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The November 18, 2010 Issue of The Capitol

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Page 1: The November 18, 2010 Issue of The Capitol

www.nycapitolnews.comVOL. 3, NO. 16 NOVember 15, 2010

Page 2: The November 18, 2010 Issue of The Capitol

www.nycapitolnews.com2 NOVEMBER 15, 2010 THE CAPITOL

BY ISMAIL MUHAMMAD

There was yet another inci-dent at Indian Point in early No-vember, but the real focus for

the three-unit nuclear power plant just south of Peekskill is on the future: Amid the details of Andrew Cuomo’s energy policy book is a renewal of his commit-ment while attorney general to close the facility.

The Power NY book does not get much into details on this proposal, stating only that “Cuomo has long been a supporter of closing the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Westchester and has argued that the federal government should not renew the plant’s operating license when it ex-pires in 2013. We must fi nd and implement alternative sources of energy generation and transmission to replace the electricity now supplied by the Indian Point facility.”

For energy market experts in New York, the proposal has a familiar ring to it: In 1994, former Gov. Mario Cuomo closed the Shoreham nuclear facility, leading to skyrocketing electricity rates in Long Is-land and the creation of the Long Island Power Authority.

Mario Cuomo decommissioned Shore-

ham due to safety concerns, noting that before the plant was even completed in 1984, local and state offi cials had ruled that the area could not be safely evacuat-ed in the event of an emergency. Added to that, the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979 and the disaster at Chernobyl fueled a general distrust of nuclear facilities.

By 1989, Cuomo and the Long Island Lighting Company, which built Shore-ham, agreed to decommission the plant, but not before a $6 billion building cost was passed on to taxpayers through a 3 percent surcharge on electric bills.

Ken Klapp, senior communications specialist for the New York Independent Systems Operator, said that Andrew Cuomo’s plan to close Indian Point could have similar consequences. Removing Indian Point’s 2,000 megawatts of power, which provides up to 30 percent of the power used in New York City and West-chester County, would create a ripple in energy supply and prices.

“The most likely fuel source for re-placement is natural gas,” Klapp said. “Replacing a relatively low cost facility like Indian Point with natural gas will lead to price volatility and could lead to higher prices.”

The ISO recently published a report that argued closing Indian Point would be disruptive to New York’s energy sup-ply, resulting in a “loss of power supply and transmission voltage support affect-ing the New York metropolitan region.”

Indian Point spokesman Jerry Nappi echoed that sentiment.

“If Indian Point were shut down, there would be energy reliability violations,” Nappi said. “That’s a way of saying that it would be a challenge to keep the lights on without Indian Point.”

State Sen. George Maziarz, who chairs the Energy and Telecommunications Committee, predicted a more dire conse-quence of closing the plant.

“I think we’d have a disaster,” he said. “I don’t know that there are any viable al-ternatives to replacing 2,000 megawatts of power downstate, especially in the timeframe they’re talking about.”

Maziarz said that he did not foresee In-dian Point closing down in the future, be-cause there are no alternatives to replac-ing the plant’s power without increasing costs. But he said the Indian Point situa-tion is different from what happened with Shoreham.

Backers of Cuomo’s plan say that the

circumstances at the two nuclear facili-ties could not be further apart. Assem-bly Member Kevin Cahill, who chairs the Committee on Energy, argued that Mario Cuomo was concerned about safety in the Shoreham decision, while the new governor-elect is more focused on the state’s energy future.

“I don’t see a similarity there,” Cahill said. “What we had at Shoreham was a plant that was inherently dangerous, where there was no means of egress should there be an emergency. Mario Cuomo addressed the safety issues of a runaway construction project. What An-drew Cuomo is doing is addressing our energy issues for the 21st century.”

Cahill also refuted the idea that the cost of closing the plant will be shifted to taxpayers.

“In the case of the Shoreham power plant, it was going to bankrupt the Long Island Lighting Company, and the Long Island Power Authority had to be created to absorb the bankruptcy. Indian Point is owned by a private entity,” he said. “If it goes offl ine, it goes offl ine, with no cost to the public.

“It’s apples and potatoes,” Cahill said. [email protected]

One Cuomo’s plan to close Indian Point charged with memories of another’s move on Shoreham

The Nuclear Option

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Page 3: The November 18, 2010 Issue of The Capitol

THE CAPITOL NOVEMBER 15, 2010 3www.nycapitolnews.com

BY ISMAIL MUHAMMED

In June, State Sen. Eric Schneider-man’s attempt to pass a bill requir-ing semi-automatic weapons to be

equipped with microstamping technology came up two votes short, thanks to strong opposition from the gun lobby.

That may be about to change: Not only is Schneiderman about to become the at-torney general, but the man he is succeed-ing, Andrew Cuomo, has come out strong-ly in favor of microstamping as well, calling it “a common sense and low-cost method of expanding the ability of police to identify guns used in illegal activities.”

But Schneiderman is not leaving the is-sue to the governor. Already, he said, he is planning to wield his new authority to support legislation in any way possible.

“Microstamping technology gives law enforcement offi cials a new tool to save lives and solve crimes without placing any restrictions on lawful gun ownership,” Schneiderman said in a statement. “As at-torney general, I will work closely with legislative leaders and smart-on-crime ad-vocates to make sure that this state-of-the-art tool is available here in New York—and with new leadership in the governor’s of-fi ce, I am confi dent that it will be.”

Sources close to Schneiderman say that his advocacy for the technology could take the form of a program bill in-troduced in the next legislative session.

But if the recounts end with a Republican Senate majority hostile to gun control legis-lation, the prospects of passage are dim.

Still, Assembly Member Michelle Schimel, who sponsored microstamping legislation in the Assembly and is cur-rently working to fi nd a sponsor in the Senate, believes that Cuomo’s leadership

and willingness to make the issue a prior-ity can make the difference.

“I was around in 2000 as a member of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence when Governor Pataki steered legislation to close the gun show loophole in the as-sault weapons ban. That made New York one of the strictest states in the country in terms of gun control, and that hap-pened with Joseph Bruno at the helm in the Senate,” she said. “So we’ve been here before, and we can do it again.”

Anti-gun advocacy groups that will play a role in the fi ght are already feeling optimistic.

“Paterson didn’t show any signs of supporting it, but Cuomo personally sup-ported it as attorney general,” said Jackie Hilly, executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence.

The legislation’s prospects might also be lifted by another big backer: Michael Bloomberg, who, in the past, has been a major benefactor to Republican legislators. State Sen. Marty Golden, an ally of Bloom-berg’s who famously was absent from the chamber during a roll call in June, effec-tively killing the bill’s chance of approval, said he thinks that Senate Republicans will at least give the legislation a fair chance.

“We know it’s a big initiative for the may-or, and we want to take it seriously,” he said. We don’t want to see anyone die from illegal handguns. I think the Legislature will work side-by-side with the governor-elect to do what’s good for the state of New York.”

He cautioned, however, that micro-stamping is still subject to the same con-cerns that hindered passage in June, even if the mayor supports it.

“Some of the issues haven’t changed,” Golden said. “Why haven’t other states entered into it? That is a big issue.”

Taking Another ShotAnti-gun advocates see new chance for microstamping bill

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The publication for and about New York State Government

Page 4: The November 18, 2010 Issue of The Capitol

www.nycapitolnews.com4 NOVEMBER 15, 2010 THE CAPITOL

BY CHRIS BRAGG

The United States’ immigra-tion system makes it famously diffi cult for even highly trained

and educated foreign workers to gain residency here. But over the past two years, New York City has started taking advantage of a little-known federal loop-hole that lets foreigners cut the line for permanent visas into the country in ex-change for cold, hard cash infused into local development projects.

The EB-5 visa program is being used to help fund three developments in Brook-lyn. Much of the focus so far has been on the program’s use to drum up cash for the fl agging Atlantic Yards project, whose de-veloper only recently decided to enlist in the program. But there are also two other developments at the Brooklyn Navy Yard that are much further along—including one where ground has already broken on construction—which should offer some indication about how the At-lantic Yards efforts might go.

Created by Congress in 1990, the EB-5 program al-lows foreign nationals to ob-tain a permanent green card by investing $500,000 in an area with high unemploy-ment that creates at least 10 jobs. The program gives investors an expedited and reliable path to citizenship—and carries no language or education requirements—while providing no-interest fi nancing to American developers.

With the economy still in recovery and fi nancing for development increasingly diffi cult to come by, the program has had a surge in popularity.

“EB-5 money is some of the most at-tractive out there,” said Peter Davidson, executive director of the Empire State Development Corporation. “It offers re-ally low-cost fi nancing.”

Davidson acknowledged that there are questions about whether letting people skip the line to become citizens is a little bit unfair. But he said that New York City

might as well take advantage of the pro-gram that other cities around the country are using.

The program has been around for two decades and has seen heavy use in states including Pennsylvania. But it wasn’t un-til 2008 that New York City opened its own Regional Center (NYCRC), a quasi-private entity licensed by the federal gov-

ernment to give out the visas that actu-ally raise the capi-tal for the projects after lending mon-ey to developers.

Offi cials at the NYCRC frequently make trips to China and other coun-tries, seeking out

investors in the projects, which are typi-cally considered fairly safe because they usually have some government funding tied to them.

The offi ce declined comment on its ac-tivities.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation was the fi rst entity in the city to take advantage of EB-5 money for a huge expansion. Andrew Kimball, presi-dent and CEO of the Development Corpo-ration, said his organization would have been unable to fi nance the expansion without the $90 million it got through the program.

“It’s been very diffi cult to fi nance any project in New York City over the past few years, and it’s much more diffi cult on a project like ours, where there’s a low re-turn on investment,” he said.

Steiner Studios, housed on the Brook-lyn Navy Yard land, followed suit and ob-

tained $65 million for its own expansion at Kimball’s urging.

Recently, the NYCRC has been try-ing to raise a whopping $249 million for Atlantic Yards. But critics question both the effectiveness and rationale of the pro-gram. In a lengthy post on Atlantic Yards Report, blogger Norman Oder questioned whether deep-pocketed developers like Forest City Ratner, the developer of At-lantic Yards, really need the funding, and whether Ratner can realistically create 5,000 jobs, as required for the amount he is receiving.

The number of jobs created, though, may not matter, because they are never actually counted, Kimball said. Instead, the amount of money invested is simply put into an economic model that proj-ects the number of jobs created via the investment, directly and indirectly. The NYCRC says it will produce a report three years after the foreign investment is received and the foreign investors, of which there are projected to be almost 500 seeking green cards, get permanent residence. Notably, Kimball said he was not aware of any instance where for-eign investors had been able to prove they had created the amount of jobs re-quired.

Other offi cials are already pushing for accountability. Council Member Letitia James urged Congress to conduct over-sight hearings to ensure jobs are actually created as promised. She also said the program sounded unfair to her.

“I think you have to raise questions,” she said, “about a program that relaxes immigration policy only as it relates to rich people.”

[email protected]

There are questions about whether letting people skip the line to become citizens is a little bit unfair, but also a feeling that New York City might as well take advantage of the program that other cities around the country are using.

For foreigners with cash, investing in the Brooklyn Navy Yard is the fastest way to citizenship

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Page 5: The November 18, 2010 Issue of The Capitol

THE CAPITOL NOVEMBER 15, 2010 5www.nycapitolnews.com

BY LAURA NAHMIAS

For the past few weeks, New York State’s Department of Insurance has been getting letters

from residents begging the agency not to approve insurance premiums hikes.

“Like I said, why are you doing this to me?” one letter writer pleads, in response to the state’s fi rst attempts to control rising insurance costs through prior approval, a measure passed last year that allows the state to veto proposed rate hikes from insurance companies.

Most of the insured saw their rates spike by double digits, according to data from the state’s Insurance Department.

This was not the effect they expected from the state’s new ability to rein in spiraling costs.

Carl Hum, head of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, said that his members were confused to see rate increases of 30 percent or 40 percent, compared to single-digit increases in past years.

The problem is two-fold, Hum said. The fi rst prior approval decisions were made in late October, just weeks after the state’s Oct. 1 deadline to start enforcing the fi rst mandates of federal health care reform, which includes coverage of preexisting conditions, increased prescription drug coverage and coverage of dependents up to the age of 26. That meant many insurance companies proposed increases much higher than usual to make up for costs they could not predict before they became subject to prior approval.

The second problem is that the state has control only over the most recent rate hikes. Insurance companies have been preparing for prior approval for months and have been able to increase premiums over that time in anticipation that any proposed increase would be vetoed after the implementation date.

The result: In the fi rst year the state is able to intervene on behalf of policyholders, rates have skyrocketed.

“The timing on this is not the greatest,” Hum said.

Insurance companies and other health care organizations, such as the Healthcare Association of New York State (HANYS), were opposed to the reinstatement of prior approval, believing it would lead to politicization of the rate increase process. That is still a fear among

insurers. None of the letters sent to the state’s Insurance Department supported proposed increases.

A spokesperson for HANYS declined comment on the issue of prior approval.

Insurers also worry the law, combined with new restrictions from health care reform, will make their companies insolvent or push the costs of health care onto health care providers themselves.

“What they’re not telling you is that they negotiate rates with providers—hospitals, doctors,” said Ben Geyerhahn, New York project director for the Small Business Majority, an advocacy organization for small businesses. “And so their issue is, do they fi ght with us, the small business people, or do they pick a fi ght with hospitals? Hospitals are a much tougher group of people to take on.”

The insurers fought hard against regulation on principle, said Troy Oechsner, the deputy superintendant for health at the state’s Insurance Department.

“If the fi nancial collapse has shown us anything, it is that deregulation doesn’t guarantee the solvency of companies,” he said.

And while small businesses and individuals might not see the benefi ts of the law’s enactment immediately, it will have a major impact in the future, he said.

“The big picture is, it worked. And the fi rst round of prior approvals shows we take solvency very seriously,” he said, adding that the regulators and teams of actuaries approved increases consistent with the rates of infl ation.

The letters keep rolling in as employers face renewal deadlines for their insurance policies. Does the Insurance Department worry it will fall victim to a case of shoot the messenger, as individuals and companies wonder if the state is complicit in rate hikes they say are crippling them fi nancially?

“When people are hurting, the rate increases are really tough and not sustainable in the long run, but we need to make tough decisions. I’d rather have the regulatory authority to be able to help people than to be standing watching on the sidelines,” Oechsner said. “If we do our job like I believe we did this time, you’ll see a broad range of business and consumer groups supporting the review. I’d like to think that’s better than no effect at all.”

[email protected]

Health Care BillsState and federal health insurance mandates collide, causing astronomical rate hikes

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www.nycapitolnews.com6 november 15, 2010 THE CAPITOLwww.nycapitolnews.com6 november 15, 2010 THE CAPITOLwww.nycapitolnews.com6 november 15, 2010 THE CAPITOL

tales of 2010

a glimpse into the independence party chairman’s mind, and into his castle

By Chris Bragg

the

MacKayreal

In the ballroom of a castle on the gold Coast of Long island, Frank MacKay was straddling the line between king and court jester. For the former nightclub owner and record producer and the current independence Party chairman, this is a famil-iar line.

it was Thursday afternoon, which meant the crowd was starting to gather for his weekly “power lunch” in Oheka Castle, the North shore wedding destination that is the second largest private residence in the United states. Built by a german baron, the place was the inspiration for Jay gatsby’s mansion in The Great Gatsby.sitting around a table so big you had to yell across, MacKay had gathered a sports

agent, a 20-year-old pop singer, the county sheriff, a filmmaker, and a former NFL play-er who passed his super Bowl ring around.

a week earlier, gov. David Paterson attended the lunch. so did a local inventor who had brought along his latest: a flame retardant goo he slopped on his hand before run-ning a blowtorch along his own fingers.

Past guests have included Eddie Money and antonin scalia.MacKay throws four-course meals with Oheka’s owner, gary Melius. They facilitate

meetings between donors, politicians, investors and developers. They also serve as a chance to woo MacKay, who has near-total control over many of the party’s local, and all the party’s statewide, endorsement decisions. Pretty much every major statewide candidate attended this year.

really not too long ago, the party was thinking of running its own candidate for sen-ate against Kirsten gillibrand. Not long after, the junior senator and Chuck schumer attended one of the lunches. Eventually, gillibrand got the line.

“she really blew us away with her performance,” MacKay recalled.This is a lesson that the veteran politicians know well. it is why two days after the

election, MacKay’s phone rang during an interview before the lunch, and schumer was on the other side, all the Brooklyn in his voice pouring through the phone as he thanked MacKay for the independence Party’s help.

MacKay beamed. after he hung up, MacKay noted that harry reid had called the day before. he has

met four presidents and is in the top 10 worldwide in Myspace friends. he has so many

Facebook friends that he kept going over the limit and had to start a separate ac-count, just for the people in Europe. he talks to Mike Bloomberg about his presi-dential plans and is already laying the preliminary groundwork for a 2012 run.

still, as he sat for an interview, this was not MacKay’s only concern. he had cho-sen to be photographed in a side room of the Castle overlooking its massive lawn, where scenes of Xanadu, the fictional castle in Citizen Kane, had been set.

But his mind was on how he would come across in the photos, hoping it might help him project the image he seems to have set his mind on more and more since he shaved off his ponytail and dropped the earring a few years back.

“Maybe,” he wondered, “this might make me look a little bit patrician?”

Back in June, MacKay held court at the far less glamorous statewide endorsement meeting of the ex-ecutive committee of the indepen-dence Party.

a small group of aging men, who labor thanklessly to petition independence candidates on the

ballot only for MacKay to often overrule them, filed into a non-descript conference room at the holiday inn in albany.

On one vote after the other, they unan-imously cast ballots for andrew Cuomo, harry Wilson, and a dapper lawyer from southampton named stephen Lynch, who would serve as a placeholder in the attor-ney general’s race.

Tom Connolly, MacKay’s No. 2 and the party’s political operative, recounted his previous evening at a local Off-Track Bet-

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THE CAPITOL november 15, 2010 7www.nycapitolnews.comTHE CAPITOL november 15, 2010 7www.nycapitolnews.comTHE CAPITOL november 15, 2010 7www.nycapitolnews.com

tales of 2010

ting parlor. Connolly’s 17-1 long shot filly had nearly pulled off an upset.

“But then she got clipped at the very end!” exclaimed Connolly, as he double-checked the party’s Wilson-Pakula autho-rization forms. With everything set, the executive committee went to lunch and Connolly headed back to the OTB.

People who know MacKay say he is extremely sensitive to personal slights against him, especially in the media.

Earlier this year, the party’s executive overruled two endorsements made by the Erie County Independence Party because Steve Pigeon, the controversial Demo-cratic operative who is under investiga-tion, had told the Buffalo News he was calling the party’s shots in Western New York.

Similarly, though party leadership

wanted to endorse Staten Island DA Dan Donovan for attorney general, it did not want to go through months of negative press releases from the five Democratic candidates running for AG directed at Donovan about the Independence Party being under investigation.

But the real problem came when Don-ovan opened his own investigation into MacKay over a loan obtained by MacKay’s wife. Though charges against him were soon found to be baseless, the damage was done—even before the Staten Island DA suddenly announced he was not going to seek the Independence support, which had always seemed like a crucial building block of a general election win. The line ultimately went to Eric Schneiderman, who pulled most of his margin on it.

MacKay wants the world to know all

the stories that purport to show his im-portance, but at the same time, desperate that none of them be attributed to him. He frequently relates almost unbeliev-able tales about rubbing elbows with the world’s most powerful people, but be-tween nearly every comma insists, “That was off the record.”

As sensitive as he is to criticism, MacKay is reluctant to speak ill even of his most bitter enemies. Of Cyrus Vance, the Manhattan DA currently investigating his party, MacKay said: “I think he’s an excellent DA and a stand-up guy.” Numer-ous times during an interview, he revised a benign statement about Carl Paladino getting a lot of votes on the Conservative Party line this year, for fear of upsetting the much-maligned Buffalo developer.

MacKay distrusts the media in gen-eral, saying that what he learned from the case against John Haggerty, the operative accused of stealing party funds from Bloomberg’s 2009 reelec-tion campaign, is that he needs to build up some PR savvy.

“The vetting process was lawyer-heavy for all of these decisions, but what we need to do in the future is look at how it’s going to look in the press and public relations-wise,” he said. “We were never accused of any crime. But we want to become a na-tional party, so there are some lessons in this.”

Beyond these legal problems, MacKay has been dealing with a minor internal revolt.

Frank Morano, a former member of the party’s executive committee from Staten Island, says that when he start-ed as chairman nearly a decade ago, MacKay—then still with a ponytail and earring—was a stalwart reformer. But Morano said he quit the party this sum-mer over what he saw as MacKay’s con-stant pandering to incumbents.

“Frank’s philosophy is to always do the easiest thing possible and take the path of least resistance,” Morano said.

A hallmark of the party platform was once term limits, but that was cast aside during the 2008 New York City term lim-its fight led by Bloomberg. In fact, until the Donovan disaster, the party has nev-er once gone against one of the mayor’s picks.

MacKay concedes that specific issues are not always the foremost on his mind in endorsement decisions.

“People accuse us of having no ideolo-gy,” MacKay said. “They don’t understand that we’re really about the candidate.”

One area where the party has proven especially ideologically flexible is the State Senate. Through the 2008 election, the Independence Party nearly always backed Republicans, but following the Democratic takeover that year, MacKay says he saw that backing people from both parties was to its advantage.

“Quite frankly, it’s much better for us

to look at the individual caucuses, situa-tion by situation,” MacKay said.

Some current and former executive committee members say they have heard a different rationale from MacKay to ex-plain why the state executive committee, in several cases, overruled local commit-tees that wanted to back Senate Republi-can challengers.

In Democrat-heavy New York, Senate Republicans often need the Conservative and Independence lines to put them over the top, while Democrats have a natural registration advantage and might be able to grow their Senate majority without fu-sion voting. According to Morano, MacK-ay told him numerous times that he had cut a deal with the Democratic majority

through which the Democrats agreed not to get rid of fusion voting in exchange for more endorsements of incumbents.

Even aside from the fact that Shelly Silver would almost certainly never go for such a deal, interviews with others who were involved in discussions suggest that the fusion change talk may have been an-other instance of MacKay’s showmanship more than anything.

MacKay sometimes applies similar thinking with the press. When asked about a decision his party has made, for instance, MacKay often gives a stock an-swer feigning ignorance about the party’s internal matters, saying he has 62 coun-ties and a national party to worry about. In more candid moments, he will reveal an intimate knowledge of even the party’s most miniscule affairs. At other times when he is asked about one of his deci-sions, he will recite a platitude about the party’s reform-minded platform. Mo-ments later, he will give you the actual reason he did something off the record, grinning slightly to let you know he is in on the joke.

As with the party itself, there have also been some tensions recently with the Real

MacKay wants the world to Know all the stories that purport to show his iMportance, but at the saMe tiMe, desperate that none of theM be attributed to hiM.

>>continued on page 8

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tales of 2010

By Andrew J. HAwkins

This was supposed to be the tea party’s year to shine. And while it was in other states, the im-

pact in New York appears to be a decid-edly mixed (tea) bag.

Many of the congressional candidates closely aligned with the tea party lost their races, such as Jill Rowland, who ran against Rep. Louise Slaughter; Theodore Danz, who ran against Rep. Paul Tonko; and Anthony Mele, who ran against Rep. Eliot Engel.

At the state level, Carl Paladino’s gu-bernatorial candidacy, born out of a righ-teous anger against New York’s dysfunc-tional state government, won a surprising primary victory against Rick Lazio, only to crumble when facing a fuller elector-ate, much like Joe Miller in Alaska or Christine O’Donnell in Delaware.

Some tea party candidates did not even make it past the primary election, like Doug Hoffman in the North Country and Gary Berntsen, who lost the chance to take on Chuck Schumer to a smooth-talking political consultant.

But there were some modest gains. Greg Ball, an Assembly member with

large support among tea party groups, easily beat back the Republican estab-lishment that tried to stop him in a pri-mary and held what Democrats had been hoping would be a side pocket pickup for Vinnie Leibell’s State Senate seat.

A well-timed endorsement from Rudy Gi-

uliani and Sarah Palin helped seal up sup-port for Michael Grimm, the ex-FBI agent who won a primary against elected official-supported Michael Allegretti and went on to beat freshman Michael McMahon.

But Grimm said his continued alle-giance to the tea party movement is not carved in stone.

“I don’t consider myself a tea party can-didate,” Grimm said a week after winning the seat. “But because I believe in small government, stopping the out-of-control spending, and a very strong support of the Constitution, we shared common values.”

Other Republicans were more critical of the movement. Dale Volker, who this year opted to retire after decades of represent-ing Western New York in the State Senate, helped his chosen successor fend off a challenge from a tea party-backed candi-date, both in the primary and in the general election. He pegged the Republican gains this year to a more generalized discontent with government spending, and less so a re-sult of an organized tea party crusade.

“I don’t think the tea party had a big impact at all,” Volker said. “What had the impact was anti-government, people fed up with stuff.”

Without an obvious leader in elected office, like Rand Paul or Michelle Bach-man, many New York tea party groups were left scrambling to explain the elec-tion results. And the word most frequent-ly used in the message boards and blogs to describe the outcome: “flop.”

[email protected]

Estate Board of New York. Only last year, REBNY and other interests identified the Independence Party as their preferred counterweight to the Working Families Party, pouring $700,000 in their account to help support several preferred New York City Council candidates. As of this year’s pre-primary filing, REBNY and others had given less than $100,000 to the Indepen-dence Party, while also giving money to the Democrats and Republicans. (More money may have flowed into the housekeeping ac-count, but that will only be visible in Janu-ary and does not seem likely to match the 2009 figure.) And in several cases this year, the Independence Party was on the oppo-site side of real estate interests.

Often, MacKay had no control over the split.

In Suffolk County, for instance, local chair Bobby Kumar had the sole author-ity to make the endorsement decision in the Craig Johnson-Jack Martins race under the Court of Appeals decision al-lowing MacKay’s executive committee to make endorsements only when a district crosses county lines.

Kumar, best known for once faking his own kidnapping a decade ago, fought off

a leadership challenge earlier in the year from Melius, the owner of Oheka Castle who runs the power lunches with MacK-ay. MacKay claimed he had nothing to do with it.

Nonetheless, Kumar endorsed Martins against MacKay’s wishes, costing John-son the line and perhaps the election. REBNY, which counts Johnson as one of its closest allies, was furious.

So for all the talk of a grand alliance and $3.5 million the industry would pour into the party, REBNY-backed candidates had the Independence line in only four of the seven races they were reportedly targeting.

“The answer is that we were not that happy with some of the decisions made by the Independence Party,” Spinola said in an August interview with The Capitol.

One strategist who works closely with the Senate Democrats said not to read too much into the long-term value of the alliance between REBNY and the party.

“The real estate industry is using the In-dependence Party for whatever benefit it can,” the strategist said. “It’s hard because the internal operations of the Indepen-dence Party almost make the Democratic Party look organized by comparison.”

On the surface, this year’s election re-sults would seem to be bad news for MacKay.

Though accepting the Indepen-dence endorsement was pretty much Andrew Cuomo’s first move

as an official gubernatorial candidate, a repeat of the 2009 situation, when Michael Bloomberg once again got his margin of victory off of his Indepen-dence votes, did not come. Far from it: The Independence Party will move from Row C to Row D—or to even E—be-cause Carl Paladino was more appealing on the Conservative line than Cuomo was on MacKay’s. The problem does not seem to have been Cuomo, who might turn out to have been more appealing on the Working Families line.

But MacKay says that is completely wrong. As he tells it, the Tea Party phe-nomenon that propelled Paladino could open up opportunities for his party na-tionally. If Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are the 2012 nominees, MacKay says, this could open the floodgates for an indepen-dent candidate. He is already shopping for a self-funded celebrity candidate if Bloomberg once again pulls himself out of the presidential. Trump, whom MacK-ay went on cable television to boost for

a White House run years back, is already floating his name again. And there will probably be others. MacKay wants to talk to them all.

To make his case, MacKay is planning to make a documentary showing how the party could get them nationwide ballot access, which he hopes will get picked up on network television. He is also produc-ing a series of radio shows on the topic that will run in Long Island. MacKay and his wife are writing a book on the possi-bility of an American Idol-esque candi-date running for president.

Still, for the moment, MacKay seems mired in a gray zone between being a lo-cally influential, if obscure powerbroker, and those national ambitions.

During one recent power lunch, MacK-ay was frequently on the phone with Con-nolly, checking in on the latest vote totals in the close race between Bob Cohen and State Sen. Suzi Oppenheimer. That was between proclamations that the Indepen-dence Party was going to become the na-tion’s third major political party.

“We would change the world if we were able to establish a third national major party,” MacKay said. “It’s just one run away.”

[email protected]

Powerful Elsewhere, The Tea Party Whiffed In New York

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In Suffolk County, home of the original tea party, town hall protest activists could not even get their man through the primary for Tim Bishop’s seat.

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TALES OF 2010

BY ANDREW J. HAWKINS

Once (or depending on how you count, twice) upon a time, Mike Gianaris was going to be attor-

ney general. Then he was going to be the speaker of the City Council. Now he fi nds himself a freshman member in what is in-creasingly likely to be a minority caucus in a legislative body reviled for its dys-function and beset by corruption.

But he is not exactly looking like the lowest down on the totem pole.

Already, Gianaris is the conference’s go-to guy to oversee the ballot recount in Western New York, where endangered Democrat Antoine Thompson is fi ght-ing to overcome a 500-vote defi cit. But more importantly, Gianaris has begun to lay the groundwork to play a signifi cant role in the Senate in the months to come. How signifi cant, though, depends on who claims the top spot in the Democratic conference, and whether Gianaris may have a shot at claiming it himself.

Gianaris’ behind-the-scenes generos-ity has already had a signifi cant impact in many of the races this year. Running for an open seat against an only nomi-nal Republican challenger, Gianaris was free to spread cash around as he saw fi t. And spread he did, giving over $120,000 in 2010 alone to over a dozen Democratic campaigns. He gave to embattled incum-bents like Bill Perkins, Shirley Huntley, Joe Addabbo, David Valesky and Suzi Oppenheimer. He gave to winning chal-lengers like Tim Kennedy, Tony Avella, Gustavo Rivera and David Carlucci. He donated to a few Democrats who failed to best their opponents, like Brian Fol-ey, Sue Savage, Mary Wilmot and Mike Kaplowitz. With so much money leftover from his aborted attorney general run, he even had enough to contribute to a hand-ful of safe incumbents, like Eric Adams and Ruth Hassel-Thompson.

Gianaris’ largesse puts him up there

CapitolConnections

with an elite group of the Senate’s top fundraisers: Jeff Klein, Carl Kruger, Mal-colm Smith and John Sampson. And all before walking across the Capitol to the Senate.

For whatever happens next in the State Senate, Gianaris seems primed to be at the center of it.

In the majority, but especially in the minority, a leadership reconfi guration seems likely. Even as the votes continue to be tabulated, the old factions that held the Senate Democrats hostage for the past several years are starting to fray. The Amigos are gone. Though Klein helped

already looking like it may be smaller, should Thompson not pull ahead in the recount.

Naturally, Gianaris says he has not one iota of interest in being a leader.

“My efforts were driven by doing whatever I could to help the Democrats win the majority,” Gianaris said recently over grilled cheese sandwiches at a din-er in Astoria. “But that’s going to be up to whatever John Sampson decides. I’m comfortable with whatever decision he makes.”

Or he could fi ll the role of Eric Schnei-derman, the attorney general-elect who served as a top deputy to Sampson and was the preferred fl oor manager for tough bills.

“He could be in the same role,” said Evan Stavisky, a Democratic political consultant who worked on Gianaris’ cam-paign. “He’s a smart, Harvard-educated lawyer who can talk politics, talk to the editorial boards and get bills passed.”

For now, Gianaris has his hands full with Thompson’s recount and the constant need to out-fundraise the Re-publicans, who, unlike the Democrats, emerged post-election in the black. He is the main sponsor of a bill to establish an independent redistricting commission, a central platform of Mayor Ed Koch’s New York Uprising movement. Having taken on Con Edison during the 2006 black-out, Gianaris also said that energy policy would be the prime focus of his offi ce. This could put him at loggerheads with the Cuomo administration, as he opposes the governor-elect’s proposal to close the Indian Point nuclear facility.

Working closely with Senate leaders to give the chamber an image makeover, though, will take precedence in those fi rst crucial weeks, he said. And how someone like Gianaris, who clearly views himself as someone destined for greater things, will approach that task will speak volumes.

“I don’t second guess my decisions,” he said. “To me, the Senate is where the battle is joined and continues to be, and that is where I thought I could make the most difference. I got into public service not to do the easy thing, but to do the hard thing.”

[email protected]

run the DSCC efforts again this year, the losses the conference suffered hit right at the heart of his support—Darrel Auber-tine and Foley are gone, and the likely loss of Craig John-son bodes nothing good for the

deputy majority leader. Only Valesky is left.

“‘Klavino’ doesn’t exist any-more,” said one operative close to

Gianaris and the Senate Democrats, referring to the nickname of Klein

and Sen. Diane Savino’s faction. “Now it’s just Klein and Sa-

vino.”The Conference

of Black Sena-tors—which has been success-ful in installing one of their own as leader since

David Paterson broke the color barrier by becom-ing the state’s fi rst black governor in 2003—may lose

Thompson in the coming weeks. Samp-

son and Smith could both end up looking

too toxic from the AEG scandal to resume their leadership posts, while Adams could suffer from being a star of the AEG report himself. Simply

by process of elimination, Gianaris could be set up

for the brass ring. And he would have more than the

money he has spread around to nurture friendships at his

back. Though a freshman, Gia-

naris is arriving in the Senate with a decade of experience in Albany, and a savvy for both public politics and backroom ne-gotiations that had some people

speculating that he would have been in line for speaker as an

eventual successor to Shelly Silver if he had stayed in the Assembly.

Now in the Senate, Gianaris is ar-riving with a strengtened Queens delega-tion through his replacement of George Onorato and Avella’s win over Frank Pa-davan.

Queens has been eager to get back the leadership position it lost when Sampson replaced Smith as head of the confer-ence, and the combination of the county organization and Gianaris’ own connec-tions could make that happen. A united Queens would mean seven votes, and importantly, these would include Smith and Huntley, breaking the strength of the conference of black senators—which is

What the process of elimination, a strengthened Queens County and a little largesse might mean for Mike Gianaris’ future

So far, one senator-elect has shown that the way

to say “generous” in Greek might be “Giana-

ris.” Time will tell wheth-er that is the translation

for leader, too.

FOR WHATEVER HAPPENS NEXT IN THE STATE SENATE, GIANARIS SEEMS PRIMED TO BE AT THE CENTER OF IT.

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TALES OF 2010

BEST/WORST CAMPAIGNS

What went right: This race far exceeded expectation because they were able to take a virtual unknown and almost get him to victory.”—Scott Levenson, The Advance Group

What went right: “You can’t give enough credit to Jim Gennaro, who in 2008 came within a breath of beating Frank Padavan. Tony Avella also got a tremendous amount of help from the Communication Workers of America. Four years ago, Frank Padavan was considered virtually unbeatable. Everyone thought that the only person who could beat him was Tony Avella.”—Scott Levenson.

“Tony ran against a guy who had two legs, but both of them were cut off at the knees. I thought thematically the campaign did a pretty good job, but Avella got lucky. Padavan was seriously disabled in his district—he hasn’t modernized his theme in 20 years.”—Norm Adler

“It’s a feat to topple an incumbent in New York, especially an incumbent like Frank Padavan, who was among the

best retail campaigners in the city. Tony Avella’s campaign team successfully used social issues—in an economic year—to siphon from the incumbent young female voters who were not inveterate Padavan voters. It was a clever strategy and it worked.”—Bill O’Reilly

After any election, there are winners and there are losers. But sometimes a loser can really be a winner, and vice versa, depending on how well their campaign performed.

Here are some of the best run campaigns of 2010, and some of the worst. The list, which is by no means exhaustive, was fi -

nalized after discussions over coffee and lengthy debates over phone and e-mail with a variety of sources—consultants, advi-sors, political sages of all stripes.

You may disagree with what follows. Needless to say, the de-bate over 2010 did not end on Election Day.

BEST CAMPAIGNS:RESULTS: WILSON 47% – DINAPOLI 50%CAMPAIGN MANAGER

Chapin Fay

CONSULTANT Nicholas Lence Organization,

Bill O’Reilly

RESULTS: SCHNEIDERMAN 55% – DONOVAN 44%CAMPAIGN MANAGER Emily Arsenault,

Jennifer Cunningham

CONSULTANT Berlin Rosen

What went right: “This was the best campaign by far, both in the primary and in the general. They dug themselves out of a multi-candidate fi eld to piece together a strong victory in the general election. All the pundits thought Schneiderman had buried himself by going to the left. They thought he couldn’t attract a suffi cient vote statewide. And he ran against a guy who was pretty well-fi nanced…”—Norm Adler

“He had to manage a statewide dynamic where there was not a lot of tension at the top of the ticket. As a result, there was a real need for the Schneiderman folks to generate turnout at the base. That took special effort.”—Scott Levenson

“He is a political animal. He’s always had a great operation. He lives and breathes politics, it’s no surprise. The New York Times certainly made that candidacy in the

primary.”—Hank Sheinkopf

“Eric Schneiderman is the Chuck Schumer of Albany; he is perpetual political motion, always seeking the advantage—and the next available job. Surviving the ‘Sharpton Annex’ remark shows his political skills and resilience. His political team is no doubt wishing quick success on Governor-elect Cuomo—and for a 2017 special election for Albany’s top job.”—Bill O’Reilly

What went right: “You can’t give enough credit to

CAMPAIGN MANAGERChristian Schneider

CONSULTING FIRM Parkside Group

RESULTS: AVELLA 53% – PADAVAN 47%

What went right: “This is a phenomenal example of races that are won in the spring, not in the fall. By avoiding a primary on the left, she was able to solidify her position statewide. She is the candidate that has shown the most growth in her term of offi ce.”—Scott Levenson

“Senator Gillibrand simply wanted this seat more than anyone else, and she did everything she needed to do to keep it. Her early fundraising prowess—and some White House urgings—allowed Democrats to coalesce around her candidacy from the get-go. Her ads touting herself as

independent of Washington were beautifully done. Kirsten Gillibrand speaks with a soft voice, but she is no shrinking violet. She and her core team of advisors should not be underestimated.”—Bill O’Reilly

RESULTS (PRIMARY): RIVERA 62% – ESPADA 32%CAMPAIGN MANAGERHoracio GutierrezCONSULTING FIRM

Berlin RosenHudson TG

[New Roosevelt Initiative]

What went right: “I don’t know how well run Gustavo Rivera’s campaign was, but Pedro Espada created a dynamic that unifi ed folks around Gustavo’s campaign in ways folks are rarely unifi ed in New York.”—Scott Levenson

“Best move of the campaign: living in the district rather than Westchester County.”—Bill O’Reilly

RESULTS: GILLIBRAND 61% – DIOGUARDI 32%CAMPAIGN MANAGER

Sarah BenzingCONSULTING FIRM

Global Strategy Group

What went right: “This is a phenomenal example of “Senator Gillibrand simply wanted this seat more than

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TALES OF 2010WORST CAMPAIGNS:

What went wrong: “I think he was a lousy retail politician. When you’re a down ballot candidate, you have to go back to your constituency all the time and talk to them, and he didn’t do it.”—Norm Adler

“In a district that voted overwhelmingly for Carl Paladino, Jack Quinn should have won this race handily. He was simply outworked by the Democrat, Tim Kennedy. There is speculation that the Quinn team underestimated Kennedy’s viability and failed to stop his momentum with hard-hitting contrast advertisements in the critical last three weeks of the race. A few more door-knocks and some tougher ads could have made the difference in this one.”—Bill O’Reilly

RESULTS: DONOVAN 44% – SCHNEIDERMAN 55%CAMPAIGN MANAGER

Marcus Reese,Bradley Tusk

CONSULTING FIRMTusk Strategies

What went wrong:“He should have done better, but he didn’t raise the money. There were high expectations, but no money.”—Hank Sheinkopf“Dan Donovan refused to ask for contributions directly because he believed it was unethical. In the end, that probably cost him the election, but his refl ection in the mirror probably still looks good to him, which is far more important. The campaign’s lack of dollars prevented the Donovan campaign from suffi ciently capitalizing on Eric Schneiderman’s ‘Sharpton Annex’ misspeak. With an extra $4 million, his team would have tattooed that in the mind of every New York voter.”—Bill O’Reilly

CAMPAIGN MANAGERJeffrey Stein

CONSULTING FIRM Global Strategy GroupGlobal Strategy Group

RESULTS: RICE 32%, SCHNEIDERMAN 34%,SEAN COFFEY 16%, RICHARD BRODSKY 10%, ERIC DINALLO 8%

What went wrong: “She is the candidate that came in with most to lose, and she underperformed miraculously in every room she walked into.”—Scott Levenson“I think the problem with Kathleen Rice is they kept hunting around for a rationale for her candidacy other than the fact that she was a district attorney and a

woman, and the rationales just didn’t make any sense.”—Norm Adler

“She didn’t win it because she never made a true case for New York residents to vote for her, and the suburbs were not enough to win.”—Hank Sheinkopf

“The Rice campaign fell to earth like the Hindenburg. She had a natural advantage of being the only female candidate for attorney general, but she needed to soar above the boys in the race. Once they got her on the ground and lured her into the scuffl e, that advantage was lost.”—Bill O’Reilly

CAMPAIGN MANAGER Kevin Fullington/Matthew

WalterCONSULTING FIRM

Arthur Finkelstein

RESULTS: LAZIO 38% – PALADINO 62%

What went wrong: “People thought I was on drugs when I said he wouldn’t be the nominee, but the Republican Party he was nominated from doesn’t exist. It’s a fi gment of the imagination of the few. He was never really in the campaign and he was the establishment candidate at a time when the establishment didn’t do well.”—Hank Sheinkopf

“He lost to a candidate he outclassed in a dozen different ways. You have to perceive that as a huge loss…”—Scott Levenson

“He raised maybe $600,000 for a statewide race. He didn’t do anything. They were very big on snacks in the campaign, maybe they fed them too much. What did he do? It never touched the voters. His campaign was directed at the working press and at potential contributors who never anted up.”—Norm Adler.

“Rick was hobbled from the start by a state party chairman less than sanguine about his candidacy. It was a devastating blow to the campaign, which was never

able to get its footing. The Lazio campaign was also in the impossible position of trying to ‘out angry’ a Western New York tea party candidate. That led it to the mosque controversy, which took the campaign far off message. Defeating Andrew Cuomo would have required a perfect campaign with all oars in the water, pulling in the same direction. What happened this year wasn’t even close.”—Bill O’Reilly

CAMPAIGN MANAGERRyan Mcleod

CONSULTING FIRM Parkside Group

VOTE: STILL UNDECIDED

What went wrong: “This was a terrible campaign! What did she do? What was the campaign? In the last redistricting…the people who drew that district counted every Democrat short of Utica to throw into Suzi’s district to get them out of Spano’s district. We kept hunting for [election districts] that

had Democrats to get them out of the other district. She had an electoral advantage that was scary. She should have won! I don’t know what kind of race they ran. She was a very long-term senator and yet they made nothing out of it. They ran away from her incumbency, as far as I’m concerned. She wins the

award for worst. Her campaign manager ought to find another line of work…”—Norm Adler“She should have been out in front of it, and she wasn’t. She should have been more aggressive earlier.”—Hank Sheinkopf

CAMPAIGN MANAGERBrendan Lovullo

CONSULTANTBrendan Quinn (No

Relation)

RESULTS: QUINN 40% – TIM KENNEDY 42%

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TALES OF 2010

BY ANDREW J. HAWKINS

The 53-year-old woman from up-state New York who received a phone call one Monday night in

early October could have confused the vaguely robotic voice on the other end for an automated recording.

But she would have been mistaken. On the other end was Dimitar Naydenov, 22, a political science major at Quinnipiac University and, for several nights a week during the school year, professional poll-ster.

After completing the call with the woman, Naydenov let out a huge breath. Of the 150 or so he calls he made that night, only three or four actually an-swered all his questions, he said. Most hung up. Some stay on, but when they realize the length of the survey—over 20 questions—they quit midway.

The 150 cubicles at Quinnipiac’s Ham-den, Conn.-based polling center are at capacity that night. Most are students, some sporting Quinnipiac Bobcat hood-ies. Some are older people looking for extra cash to help pay bills or supple-ment their kid’s tuition. Some are bored, staring off into space or talking to their neighbor, while keeping an eye out for the red-shirted staff members milling around with clipboards.

With the growing number of polls, as well as a growing interest online in aggre-gating polls, they are playing a more dom-inant role in elections than ever before. Instantly, they can turn news coverage, infl uence candidates and change voters’ minds.

But the fl urry of polls—public, private, online, aggregate—were more confusing than clarifying this year. Many were accu-rate, some were wildly off base.

And as the polling profession becomes more complex—with young people aban-doning landlines for cell phones and demographic groups like Spanish-only households growing in number—many professionals are making a different kind of prediction, one in which their industry will have to radically adjust course, em-brace newer and more expensive meth-ods, or face becoming irrelevant.

Like fi ngerprints and snowfl akes, ev-ery pollster’s methods are unique.

Mickey Carroll, Quinnipiac’s irascible director, likes to call his approach for identifying likely voters “the Cuisinart ap-proach”—evaluating a cohort of people most likely to vote in an election through a series of questions.

Doug Schwartz, Carroll’s PhD-sporting deputy, admits the process is only slightly

more scientifi c than that. “In essence, its people that say they’re

going to vote, and people who pay atten-tion to politics,” Schwartz said. “You have to be registered too.”

Quinnipiac weighs its results based on census data, like age, race, gender and education. It also randomly generates

numbers and talks to anyone over age 18. Siena polls 1,000 people and then applies a likely voter screen, fi ve questions with a computed score. Both say their methods are rigorous, but not foolproof.

A likely voter to Quinnipiac is not nec-essarily a likely voter to Marist, Siena, Rasmussen, Zogby or any of the dozen or so other polling fi rms. And the variations in defi nitions and methodologies lead to the type of polls like Quinnipiac’s Sept. 22

poll, which had Andrew Cuomo and Carl Paladino only six points apart, a far cry from the 30-point gulf between the two candidates reported by Marist two days later.

Schwartz said likely voter models ac-count for the most differences between polls.

“It’s judgment,” he said. “It’s also just based on my own re-search into this. They may have found things that worked for them, I fi nd things that work for us. We’ll fi nd out at election time whose method works the best.”

Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opin-ion, blames a lack of standards in the world of polling for varia-tions and confusion.

“It’s a problem,” he said. “There’s no licensing, nor can

there be. There’s no requirement that polling organizations adhere to any of the standards that are being advanced. In the world of quick and dirty journalism that we now live, quick and dirty polls can fi nd their place.”

A week after the election, many poll-sters were patting themselves on the back for getting it right, getting it close or getting within spitting distance.

Both Quinnipiac and Siena accurately

predicted the spread in the attorney gen-eral race, but had Eric Schneiderman un-derperforming by about 10 points. Like-wise with the comptroller race, with polls showing DiNapoli and Wilson trading the lead back and forth like a hot potato, vot-ers struggled to identify either candidate, as well as the purpose of a comptroller.

Quinnipiac had DiNapoli over Wilson by more than 15 points in its September and October polls. Siena had the comp-troller winning by 17 and 18 points. In the end, DiNapoli squeaked by with a three-point lead.

Scott Keeter, director of survey re-search at the Pew Research Center, said that state and local races are next to impossible to poll, and the results often fl uctuate. Polling in three of the con-tested congressional races—Tim Bishop, Michael Arcuri and Dan Maffei—had the incumbent Democrats winning by slim margins. Arcuri lost, while Bishop and Maffei are locked in discouraging re-counts.

“It’s just a more challenging thing to poll local races,” Keeter said. “You had debates going on until the end of the fi nal week of the campaign. And its possible that some things were said in late debates made a difference. The places where you did have some errors, there were some lo-cal explanations.”

“There’s no licensing, nor can there be. There’s no requirement that polling organizations adhere to any of the standards that are being advanced,” said Marist’s Lee Miringoff. “In the world of quick and dirty journalism that we now live, quick and dirty polls can fi nd their place.”

The Cure For The Common PollAfter another year of wacky results, predictions for better methodologies and a more accurate future

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At Quinnipiac, each pollster calls about 150 numbers, but only a fraction complete the survey.

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tales of 2010Private pollsters rip the public insti-

tutes for their likely voter models. Many trade in their own lists of registered vot-ers. Jerry Skurnik of Prime New York will contract out one of his lists for around $10,000. Michael Bloomberg had Doug Schoen compile an exhaustive comput-erized database of voter information for polling purposes. Price tag: over $10 mil-lion. Supposedly, though, that database showed the Bloomberg campaign some-thing last year what none of the public polls did, which Bill Thompson’s internal pollsters were saying all along: The race was extremely tight. For anyone on the Thompson campaign, mentioning the polling breakdown is a guaranteed route to a bitter rant.

Internal polls have their own prob-lems, sometimes too focused on spinning things in a way that the candidate pay-ing for the poll might like to hear. Kath-leen Rice’s internal polls showed her six points ahead a few days before she nar-rowly lost the primary to Schneiderman. Likewise, Rick Lazio’s pollsters were tell-ing him he had the race sewn up, but he lost the primary by a 2-1 margin.

The spike in the number of cell phone-only households has added another com-plication. Schwartz says that not only is it more expensive to poll cell phone users, but it may be statistically insignificant to the bottom line.

“I don’t think it makes much of a dif-ference in terms of accuracy,” he said. “It doesn’t really effect the bottom line in terms of accuracy. But it is the pure thing to do.”

By not including cell phones, polls

run the risk of neglecting the opinions of younger voters and having their results appear skewed to the right, with most landline-only polls showing a noticeable slant. Marist uses a combination of cell and landline respondents. Siena had a

target of 13-17 percent cell users per poll, but it proved too expensive, said Donald Levy, director of the Siena Research In-stitute.

“We’re a field that has a lot of good people that are smart and are trying to continue to measure public opinion as accurately as possible,” Levy said. “It’s an exciting field, albeit one with problems.”

Lopsided races present other prob-lems for many polls, where it can be more difficult to peg one candidate’s wide mar-gin than to estimate a close race. But the thirst for more polls and more transpar-ency is, in part, responsible for the burst in online surveys and aggregating sites, which can lead to suspicious results that can influence the outcome of elections. Were polls that showed Cuomo with a commanding lead suppressing Paladino’s turnout? Or by conveying an aura of in-vincibility, were they actually suppress-ing Cuomo’s turnout?

Cuomo, of course, won. And voter turnout in New York City was about half of what it was in 2008. So both concerns may have turned out true.

“There’s a tremendous thirst for this information,” Levy said. “The question behind the question is, ‘Do polls influence the outcome?’ But if there’s too many of them, just like if there’s too many crime shows on TV, then don’t watch them.”

[email protected]

By Laura Nahmias

Ambiguously titled groups tak-ing advantage of the Citizens United ruling funneled anony-

mously donated cash into races around the country in 2010, and New York was no exception. At least two new national entities poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into a handful of New York State Senate campaigns, according to state campaign finance records.

One group, the Republican State Lead-ership Committee-New York, drew more than $870,000 in small donations of $100 to $200 from California to Kansas, which was spent on television ads targeting State Sens. Darrel Aubertine and Brian Foley, as well as Buffalo Democrat Tim Kennedy. Both Aubertine and Foley lost their races, while Kennedy narrowly won his race. Foley’s loss came despite an in-dependent expenditure of $100,000 from union 32 BJ SEIU, similar to the one that helped him upset a Republican incum-bent in 2008.

The RSLC independent expenditure

appears to be part of the fundraising ef-fort organized by Karl Rove and Ed Gil-lespie, the former Republican Party chairman, said Bill Mahoney, an analyst at the New York Public Interest Research Group.

Democrats, meanwhile, had their own well-financed outside group, the DLCC New York Committee, which has yet to report on which races it spent more than $197,000 in donations. That committee, which operates out of Washington and is new since August, is an arm of the nation-al Democratic Party, Mahoney said.

They were not alone. Frack Action USA spent about $50,000

on a commercial featuring actor Mark Ruffalo urging voters to support candi-dates, such as Rep. Maurice Hinchey, who opposed hydrofracking in the Marcellus Shale. American Crossroads, the con-servative so-called “Super PAC,” report-edly spent about $500,000 in ads against Hinchey.

Fight Back New York, a pro-marriage equality PAC, claims it achieved its goals with more than $800,000 spent against

candidates who did not support gay mar-riage. Their victims include Sens. Hiram Monserrate and Bill Stachowski, but the group was unable to oust Sens. Shir-ley Huntley and Ruben Diaz Sr. in their primaries. And any victory is sure to be tempered by the potential loss of Demo-crats Craig Johnson and Antoine Thomp-son, both gay marriage advocates who worked within the conference to push the marriage bill.

A $1 million get-out-the-vote effort by the Seneca Nation targeting senators like Antoine Thompson for a perceived lack of support on their key issues may have had some impact in Western New York, where Thompson is struggling to keep his seat.

Meanwhile, a $200,000 expenditure by three of the state’s largest unions in sup-port of a Martin Act expansion and Fol-ey, Aubertine and David Valesky did not prevent Foley and Aubertine from losing their races by wide margins.

The charter schools movement was similarly listless in this election. Des-ignated Democratic candidates Basil Smikle, Lynn Nunes and Mark Pollard all

Independent Expenditures Poured Cash In, Got Mixed Results Out

lost in the primaries. Groups such as the Democrats for Education Reform and its PAC, which both can contribute directly to candidates, spent almost nothing on the general election, according to state campaign finance records.

The New York Uprising PAC, dedicat-ed to independent redistricting and re-form in Albany, reported spending about $60,000 in the 11-day pre-general filing. It is not clear from the filing where they spent their funds, but the group probably spent against its “enemies of reform,” the list of Assembly members and senators who refused to sign a pledge for indepen-dent redistricting.

And the New Roosevelt Initiative, which seemed invincible after toppling Pedro Espada in the primary elections this fall, was unable to use its clout or an independent expenditure to install Mary Wilmot as senator in upstate New York against incumbent Sen. James Alesi. The group spent more than $325,000 on the campaign. Most of those funds went to Rivera’s primary challenge.

The number of independent expendi-tures in New York is small compared to other states, because New York’s cam-paign finance laws are so lax that it is not necessary to form a separate committee to give large sums to a candidate. And because the state board of elections has little power to enforce the law, expendi-tures aren’t always reported accurately, Mahoney said.

[email protected]

10%

30%

50%

70%

20%

40%

60%

july 2010

august 2010

september 2010

october 2010

cuomocuomo

cuomo cuomo

paladinopaladino

paladino

paladino

Quinnipiac

61%

34%

final results

final results

Siena MariSt

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By Isha MItra

The collapse of the SUNY Empowerment plan and UB2020 helped take Bill Stachowski down, but it seems to have helped defeat Bri-

an Foley and Antoine Thompson (whose race is still stuck in a recount) too.

In August, Stachowski and Foley released a state-ment before the passage of the budget stating that they had reached a “framework” agreement on the bill. But the decision was widely seen as a capitulation to downstate interests opposed to the bill, infuriating state and local leaders of the Building Trades Council, whose member-ship they say has been devastated by the recession, with unemployment at 50 percent in some areas.

Had it passed, the legislation would have given SUNY more power over its capital construction bud-get, which was expected to create 9,000 construction jobs in the Buffalo area alone.

When Paul Brown, president of the Buffalo Building Trades Council, heard that Stachowski and Thompson voted for a budget without provisions for UB2020, the University of Buffalo’s portion of the plan, he immedi-ately withdrew his political support from the Buffalo Democrats.

“It was just absolute garbage,” said Brown. “They put it in the budget, and on the last day, they just changed their position.”

The blame directed towards Stachowski has irked supporters of the fallen Democrat, considering that he was the initial sponsor of the bill. But the loss of the building trades support certainly hurt Stachowski’s campaign, even if he is reluctant to admit it.

“Stachowski did more for UB2020 than anyone else,” said Stachowski spokesperson Ben Swanekamp. “While not necessarily a game-changer, it was very unfortunate that he lost the backing of the building trades.”

Thompson, meanwhile, has two SUNY schools in his district, but Brown claims the senator held off on ad-vocating for the SUNY Empowerment plan as a favor to Democratic leadership. Immediately after Thomp-son lost the building trade’s support, Grisanti won it by vowing to pass UB2020 as one of his first priorities.

“These guys are crazy for not fighting for UB2020, and both of them lost because of it,” said Brown. “This was important to people in Buffalo since we could have expanded and developed the city.”

Foley never lost the support of the Building Trades Council in Suffolk. But many believe he lost a hefty amount of support in his district with his vote for the MTA payroll tax, which his opponent, Lee Zeldin, suc-cessfully pegged to job losses in the district. The SUNY Empowerment plan, with its projected job creation, would certainly have boosted Foley’s flagging cam-paign.

Ed Malloy, head of the state’s Building and Construc-tion Trades Council, said he believes a more regionally balanced Senate Republican majority will follow through on promises initially made by the Democrats.

“I think you just have to look at the history and the lack of jobs upstate. We don’t know why the people in Albany did what they did or how they make decisions,” Malloy said, “but the lack of economic development is there. I think the new leadership will make UB2020 a priority.”

Killing The SUNY Empow-erment Plan Hurt More Than Just Stachowski

By Laura NahMIas

Sure, the pro-marriage equality and LGBT rights advocacy groups helped

install three new Democratic sena-tors, which translates into three new “yes” votes on gay marriage from Tony Avella, Tim Kennedy and David Carlucci. Mike Gianaris replacing George Onorato would be new vote No. 4, if and when it ever makes it back to the floor.

And that was not the only reason to cheer: November’s elections also sent Harry Bronson, the first openly gay Assembly member from outside the city, to Albany.

But gay rights groups are also in danger of losing two of the mea-sure’s most active proponents, An-toine Thompson and Craig Johnson. And Eric Schneiderman, one of the architects of the legislation and the push to a vote, has not gone far but can no longer manage bills on the floor for the Senate Democrats.

Johnson and Thompson were seen as key advocates of the mea-

sure in the suburbs and upstate, according to Alan van Capelle, the former executive director of the Em-pire State Pride Agenda. Thompson especially was key in drumming up “yes” votes among the Conference of Black Senators.

The most important factor for guaranteeing success for any mar-riage equality bill is the “political will within the conference to move it through,” van Capelle said. “I don’t see today who those people are.”

Johnson, Thompson and Schnei-derman represented three different regions of the state, with vastly dif-ferent constituencies, he said. That kind of coalition is important for the bill’s passage.

“Hindsight is 20-20. But today, leadership in the LGBT community needs to spend time thinking who will be our champion within the con-ference,” van Capelle added. “We need someone to own this issue. And it can’t be one person and it can’t be the sponsor of the bill. I don’t think the sponsor has shown real leader-ship on the issue,” referring to Tom

Duane, the bill’s primary sponsor and the only openly gay member of the Senate.

Van Capelle hoped that senators such as Liz Krueger might be able to pick up where Thompson and John-son had left off, even if Republicans win the majority, which appears likely.

Duane and van Capelle have been at odds for months, and, not surpris-ingly, Duane’s office dismissed van Capelle’s claims.

“Senator Duane is very passion-ate, as he always has been, about making marriage equality a reality in New York,” said Mark Furnish, Duane’s counsel.

Ross Levi, who replaced van Capelle as the Empire State Pride Agenda’s executive director last spring, and Marty Rouse of the Hu-man Rights Campaign were also en-couraged by statements from Senate Republican Leader Dean Skelos to bring the issue to the floor for a vote.

“But,” as van Capelle said, “a vote does not guarantee passage.”

[email protected]

Gay Marriage Got More Yes Senators, But Lost Key Advocates To Force Another Vote

Page 15: The November 18, 2010 Issue of The Capitol

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TALES OF 2010

ENDORSEMENTSCORECARD

Clinton. Cuomo. Pataki. Giuliani. Bloomberg. Two Democrats, two Republicans and one Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-independent who were the most sought-after endorsements in New York this year. A nod from one could mean the difference between victory and defeat. How their picks fared paints a portrait not just of their political precognition, but their infl uence with the electorate, as well as how many favors each will be asked for--or be able to ask for--in the years ahead.

Andrew CuomoTom DiNapoliCarolyn MaloneyTim KennedyEric Schneiderman

Scott MurphyMichael McMahonMichael ArcuriJohn Hall

Dan MaffeiTim Bishop

Eric SchneidermanDavid CarlucciEd BraunsteinFrancisco MoyaBill OwensTony Avella

Mike KaplowitzBrian FoleyMike McMahonJoanne YepsenJanele Hyer-SpencerMichael ArcuriJohn HallMary Wilmot

Suzi Oppenheimer

Andrew Cuomo Carolyn McCarthy Pete KingJonathan BingFrank PadavanAdriano EspaillatLiz KruegerSam HoytSteve IsraelGary AckermanNita LoweyCharlie RangelFrancisco MoyaGuillermo Linares

Harry WilsonFrank PadavanMichael McMahonDan Donovan

Bob CohenCraig Johnson

Greg BallNicole MalliotakisChris Gibson

Carl PaladinoRick LazioAnthony ComoDan DonovanGeorge PhillipsDan DonovanHarry WilsonMatt Doheny

Bob CohenAnn Marie Buerkle

Michael GrimmChris Gibson

Anthony ComoMatt DohenyDan DonovanHarry WilsonFrank PadavanAndrew RussoJohn GomezDavid Malpass

Randy Altschuler

BY CHRIS BRAGG

Once it became clear this spring that Tom Morahan’s health problems would prevent him

from running for reelection, Senate Republicans began pushing Rockland County Executive Scott Vanderhoef as their candidate precisely because of his vast name recognition. Internal Republican polling showed Vanderhoef earning 40 percent, and other potential GOP candidates, Rockland County Legislator Ed Day and Clarkstown Councilman Frank Borelli, at around 10 percent.

But Vanderhoef, who focused his campaign on repealing the MTA payroll tax, did not do enough to highlight his own experience. But then again, neither did the Senate Republican Campaign Committee, which was distracted by the primary fi ght between Greg Ball and Mary Beth Murphy, according to Day.

“Senate Republicans clearly blundered in believing that Scott was a shoo-in because of his name recognition,” Day said. “They instead decided to invest their money in a family feud because they didn’t like Greg Ball personally.”

Vanderhoef has run one of the state’s most populous counties, managing a

workforce of 2,600 and a budget of $700 million. David Carlucci, the fresh faced 29-year-old Clarkstown town clerk, runs an offi ce with a staff of fi ve and a budget of less than $400,000.

Carlucci turned that long incumbency to his advantage, sending out over 20 mailers hitting Vanderhoef on property taxes that have soared to the highest levels in the nation, vowing that if elected, he would vote to cap them. Also, Vanderhoef took a long-delayed $17,000 salary increase, while Carlucci declined his.

A relentless campaigner, Carlucci attended a candidate forum in a Republican-heavy area of Orange County that Vanderhoef did not. He shoved himself in front of Andrew Cuomo when the RV arrived for day one of Cuomo’s Drive for New York tour.

In Haverstraw, one of the most heavily Hispanic towns in the country, Carlucci brought in José Peralta and Adriano Espaillat to campaign. In Spring Valley, he microtargeted the heavy African-American and Haitian populations. He even made inroads into Kiryas Joel’s ultra-Orthodox community, a Morahan stronghold. With Liz Krueger’s prompting, he sent out a mailer in the heavily Jewish

district highlighting the fact that his mother is Jewish.

Though not the deciding factor in the race, local Republicans also said that fear

of the county executive offi ce swinging to Democrat from Republican also may have cost Vanderhoef support and votes. There are a huge number of patronage jobs controlled by the county executive, and only a handful by a state senator—even one in the majority.

For whatever problems they might have had with Vanderhoef’s leadership, the local GOP was not eager to see their party lose dibs on all those salaries. This

worked on the Democratic side, too, with some in the party more interested in fi nding a strong candidate to take Vanderhoef on in his next election, or in the special election to succeed him, than in devoting too much time or money to the State Senate race. The close relationship between the Morahan and Zebrowski families was also seen as a factor in why Assembly Member Ken Zebrowski did not enter the race.

Democratic Ramapo Town Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence, an early candidate for lieutenant governor, was said to be considering a run should Vanderhoef win, motivating some Republicans to cross county lines, according to Borelli. Many voters, he said, had expressed

concerns about St. Lawrence’s pro-development agenda and close ties to his area’s ultra-Orthodox community.

“We’re a tight-knit community,” Borelli said, “and everyone was talking to everyone else about that pretty widely.”

[email protected]

“Senate Republicans clearly blundered in believing that Scott was a shoo-in because of his name recognition,” said Rockland County Legislator Ed Day, at one point a potential Republican candidate for Tom Morahan’s seat. “They instead decided to invest their money in a family feud because they didn’t like Greg Ball personally.”

With Incumbency And Name Recognition, Republicans Took A Seat For Granted

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tales of 2010

By Edward-Isaac dovErE

For Dan Donovan, the morning af-ter the Democratic primary was a dream come true. For a year,

Donovan had been worried about going up against Nassau DA Kathleen Rice, but hoping that somehow the Democrats would give him Eric Schneiderman in-stead.

No one could have predicted that Schneiderman would win by double digits. So how could his primary op-ponents or Donovan have hit Schnei-derman? Voting for bills that cut back incarceration, supporting tax increases, being a member of the Legislature in an anti-incumbent year, running unrepen-tantly to the left, huge labor expendi-tures on his behalf, being a liberal from the West Side, questions about whether he would be conflicted out of investi-gating his former colleagues in the Sen-ate, never fully answering questions about his own self-financed campaign, no prosecutorial experience, a hit-and-run in the middle of the campaign, An-drew Cuomo’s obvious efforts to keep him off the ticket, the truth about the deputy sheriff story, the Sharpton an-nex gaffe—take your pick.

But none of the candidates who tried to beat Schneiderman ever did. Instead, the campaigns against him, in the primary and the general, were a hodgepodge of at-tacks, no clear narrative, nothing stick-ing, and Schneiderman’s campaign man-aged an efficient, rapid-fire operation that made the other campaigns’ lack of mes-sage all the more glaring in contrast.

Eric Schneiderman Was Too Vulnerable To Be Vulnerable

Donovan and Rice did attack as they saw fit, but faced with a feast of options, seemed more paralyzed than energized. Unchallenged in any signifi-cant way, Schneiderman addressed the issues and criticisms and moved past them. He started issuing policy papers to make his the campaign of substance, and framed Donovan around three

themes: Bernie Kerik; anti-abortion; and lax on Wall Street. But there was not much to beat back. The new at-torney general comes into office with many of his fault lines exposed, none of them fully exploited and a huge head start in rebutting them whenever they come up next.

Even Schneiderman still seemed

shocked that he had survived as he claimed victory on election night.

“I’m humbled and honored tonight,” Schneiderman said, “and really kind of amazed to stand here before you as the next attorney general.”

And, he added, “You may have noticed, I’m hard to kill.”

[email protected]

By Edward-Isaac dovErE

The voters overwhelmingly elected him—and ac-cording to a Siena poll released two weeks later, they think Andrew Cuomo will come through.

Political insiders, though, are not so sure. Though no one will say so publicly, they wonder how Cuomo will keep his promises, and how he will react when the Legislature pushes back. They doubt it can hap-pen, and they cannot stop thinking of the many ways things could go wrong. Is Cuomo really the man to tame Albany? Can he actually stare down Shelly Sil-ver? Is there any way for the budget hole not to swal-low everything?

They have, after all, been burned before. In 2006, more of the old political pros got pulled in to Eliot Spitzer’s rhetoric than they would ever now admit.

“I’m excited to go back to the city and tell people it’s a new day—and you know what? It just might be,” Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said, walking out of Spitzer’s first State of the State, a few days after the inauguration.

Stringer was far from the only fan. Eric Schneider-man had been looking forward to working with Spitzer for months, and he came out of the speech feeling su-

percharged about the session ahead. “The element that was so brilliant about it is that

he essentially kicked the whole process into the mode we’re usually at in June,” Schneiderman said, a few days later. “He set everyone’s agenda. He didn’t just set his own agenda.”

Even David Paterson got them going for a moment, between the ding-dong-the-Spitz-is-dead feeling in March of 2008 and his swearing-in speech that could have been mistaken for a Catskills stand-up routine. And then… well, and then everything.

Looking forward to working with what will be the eighth governor he has served under as he enters his 41st year in Albany, Assembly Member Dick Gottfried said that the skepticism is only natural.

“If by that you mean people are being cautious about being too optimistic about the new governor, I can understand that,” Gottfried said. “Not out of any per-sonal criticism of Andrew—but I’ve served with quite a few governors, mayors and presidents, so I have long ago gotten used to the idea that no matter how well I thought of an incoming governor or mayor, I’ve come to understand it will only be a matter of weeks before I will be annoyed at that person about something.”

[email protected]

Cuomo Won The Election, But The Insiders Remain Skeptical

Page 17: The November 18, 2010 Issue of The Capitol

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TALES OF 2010

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

BY LAURA NAHMIAS

Losing two meant losing four. As one Suffolk Democratic

operative put it, losing both Dave Mejias and Regina Calcaterra was like running your pawns out early in a chess game, and letting them get taken. The absence of the two candidates left Craig Johnson and Brian Foley open to the economic attacks Republicans were already honing to a fi ne point.

“Losing them was bad,” said one consultant affi liated with the Senate Democrats.

“We didn’t bank on them, but having viable challengers out there would dilute Republican resources. As it was, once they were gone, they were really able to focus in on Brian Foley and Craig Johnson.”

Assembly Member Chuck Lavine, a Nassau Democrat, said he saw an opportunity to rebound off the Mejias debacle by focusing more attention on his replacement, Francesca Carlow, which would have encouraged the Republicans to spend money on protecting incumbent Kemp Hannon.

But that was not to be. Lack of support for the replacement candidates left the Democrats “completely on the defensive,” Lavine said.

Mejias and Calcaterra’s fl ameouts were highly visible, but problems were roiling on Long Island for Democrats for much longer between the MTA payroll tax and support for charter schools, moves seen as anti-union. The payroll tax alone cost Foley the Newsday endorsement. That was it for him.

Johnson’s race, though still undecided, was crippled by underfunding from the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. The DSCC piled money on new candidates in upstate races, assured by Johnson’s campaign that he was beyond safe. The closeness of the race surprised many Democrats. More than $235,000 went to Mary Wilmot and more than $78,000 to Joanne Yepsen, both upstate challengers who ultimately lost. Johnson and Foley both received upward of $100,000 in the waning days of the campaign, but the boards were

On Full Defense Instead Of Offense, Democrats Lost Long Island Again

already mostly set by then. At an August picnic event in Port

Washington, teachers union members who phone-banked for the candidate’s 2008 race swore they would never vote for him again. One union member called his stance “anti-union” and “traitorous,” and claimed it would have made his mother, a Nassau County legislator whose seat Johnson fi lled after her death, “roll over in her grave.”

Johnson and Rep. Tim Bishop may also have suffered because of the names

BY ANDREW J. HAWKINS

Every successful Republican ticket over the past several decades has included at least one name from

Westchester County. Looking at the GOP bench coming out of the 2010 elections, it would seem Rob Astorino is up next.

Astorino, the Westchester county ex-ecutive who rode that initial wave of voter anger in 2009 to defeat incumbent Democrat Andy Spano, is seen as a rising star in the Republican Party. While the Republicans emerged from this election with a much more robust, well-stocked farm team for future races, with a host of new state senators, Assembly and con-gressional members from all parts of the state, none perhaps have as large a base or as forceful a bully pulpit as Astorino.

Possible campaigns for Astorino in-

clude a 2012 challenge to Sen. Kirsten Gil-librand, who dispatched a slew of prima-ry opponents and a little-known general election rival, or even a run for governor, perhaps after Andrew Cuomo makes his rumored presidential ambitions offi cial.

But with less than half a million cur-rently in his campaign coffers, much of his time over the next few years would have to be spent building a reliable donor base, as well as courting state powerbro-kers.

On the surface, Astorino has much in common with Cuomo: spending cuts, consolidating local services, property tax caps, etc. In fact, as the Election Day votes were still being tabulated, Astorino made clear he stood with the state’s new governor on many of those issues.

“I think some of the things Andrew Cuomo said, you close your eyes, he

sounded like a Republican,” said Asto-rino, standing at the Republicans’ party in the midtown Manhattan Hilton. “He was willing to take on those issues. I’ll stand right next to him. He’s going to need help, and we’re going to need that kind of lead-ership to change some real recalcitrant people and positions in this state.”

But he also stressed that when it comes to fi xing the state’s fi nances, Cuomo and other state leaders will need more than just the right sounding speech to save the day.

“Look, he could get rid of every state worker and it wouldn’t make a difference. Its Medicaid and its pensions,” Astorino said. “And unless he, the Senate and the Assembly make some real reform on that, the state’s going to continue to go down-hill.”

[email protected]

Rob Astorino Is The Next Great GOP Hope

at the top of the ballot, some Democratic consultants said.

Turnout for Tom DiNapoli, who is from Nassau, lagged far behind the number of votes cast for Andrew Cuomo, which was seen as especially disappointing for a native son of the island. Cuomo turned out 200,000 votes in each county, but DiNapoli managed just 156,000 votes in Suffolk and even fewer in Long Island. He lost his own old Assembly district.

Neither Eric Schneiderman nor DiNapoli fared better than their

Republican opponents on Long Island, leaving Democrats to wonder how the outcome might have changed had Nassau District Attorney Kathleen Rice been the attorney general nominee.

“There defi nitely would have been a stronger outpouring in Nassau and Suffolk counties,” Lavine said.

Compounding the pain felt by many Democrats was the belief that Long Island was going to be the next frontier, the place where moderate Democrats could incubate a formidable farm team and expand their hold over state government.

“This was the perfect storm, but it was also a natural realignment,” said one operative. “Long Island has been a Republican stronghold for decades.”

[email protected]

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tales of 2010

running for lieutenant governor so that he could be State Senate president and force the Democrats to take up the reform agenda that they had largely abandoned since taking the majority.

He was not heartened by the response he generated from the governor-elect’s team.

“There clearly is a divergence of macro thinking in what it takes to make change,” Samuels said.

The pressure from state Democratic chair Jay Jacobs and other Cuomo em-issaries was enough to convince him that he would be pushed completely to the sidelines, and he did not see how he could withstand that and successfully oust Pedro Espada, his top priority. Sam-uels gave up his own candidacy, threw a couple hundred thousand of his own money into the New Roosevelt Initiative, and started spending more of his time in the South Bronx.

Samuels, along with Liz Krueger, can take most of the credit for Gustavo Ri-

vera, though he was the only one of the New Roosevelt Ini-tiative candidates to win.

The lesson, Samuels said, is that changing Albany was just not enough.

“The untold story of this election is that there really is no movement for reform yet,” Samuels said, sitting in yet another midtown law firm office—this one where New Roosevelt has space for a few desks and its small staff.

Though he is a fan of Cuo-mo, he worries that there was not enough passion on the streets behind the gubernato-rial campaign. There was also too much fear about job loss to get people caring about re-form.

But if Cuomo achieves progress on the budget and cost-cutters like consolida-tion, Samuels believes, he will clear the way for a focus on esoteric issues like redistrict-

ing in 2012. “The work to be done not only requires

leadership from the governor, but needs a movement,” Samuels said.

He plans to keep New Roosevelt go-ing in preparation for that opportunity, devising new ways to get people talking about every area of reform, from building up civic engagement to making New York the first full-time state legislature in the country.

Depending on how things go, he may end up crossing paths with Koch on the campaign trail. The former mayor says he remains committed to calling out anyone who reneges on the NY Uprising pledge in whatever way he can muster, even if that means marching around the state to ev-ery offending legislator’s district.

“I hope I don’t have to, but I’m pre-pared to do it,” Koch said, laughing at the people who thought he could not get do much at the age of 85. “After all, I’m only one year older—I’m 86.”

[email protected]

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By Edward-Isaac dovErE

A week after Election Day, a graying crowd gathered in a large room at a law firm on the

43rd floor of the New York Times build-ing for drinks and hummus, a panoramic view of the brake lights in midtown traf-fic, and a discussion of the frustrating ef-fort to overcome New York State’s many structural problems. On the panel were former Mayor Ed Koch, Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch, New York Civic’s Henry Stern, and Philip K. Howard, the official host of the event and author of The Death of Common Sense.

Looking back on the year and ahead to the next few years in Albany, the mood was not upbeat. Koch, under the weather by the time he arrived, vomited before the event and left before they opened up to questions before the crowd. But that did not change the general tenor of the dis-cussion: three men debating where things belonged in the hierarchy of diagnosing Albany’s ills, and Ravitch repeating over and over again that none of their com-plaints mattered too much in the face of a $10 billion budget gap that no one seemed ready to address.

Eight months ago, several of the same faces were among the crowd that Koch convened at his law firm for an invitation-only griping session. The long, sprawling conversation seemed like it was going ex-actly nowhere, and probably would have, if not for the intervention of Bradley Tusk, a political consultant and former Bloomberg campaign manager.

While Koch was still taking meetings to pile on more frustration and friends of the cause, Tusk forced him to work with-in a structure, hire two staffers who had come off Bloomberg’s 2009 campaign, and synthesize his complaints into a few

discrete topics: redistricting reform, eth-ics reform, budget reform. They came up with a gimmick—the NY Uprising pledge; they came up with a logo—a Capitol bro-ken apart by the name of their group; and they rolled Koch out to every reporter they could.

By Election Day, 356 people had signed the pledge, including all but eight out of 62 members of the State Senate (and both conference’s leaders). Even Andrew Cuo-mo, who made his way through the elec-tion without making many commitments beyond those expressed in his own policy books, chose not to risk losing Koch’s endorsement by signing on with a letter Koch proudly blew up and displayed at the NY Uprising press conference.

For all of that, Koch said he is proud of what he did in 2010.

“We have come a long way, far further and more successful than anyone, my-self included, thought it would be at the time,” Koch said. “Some of the good gov-ernment organizations were shocked that we were able to do what they had tried to do for years.”

Of course, Koch acknowledges that his pledge may soon become the latest broken promise in Albany. But getting legislators on paper during this raucous year was enough to give him some hope.

“My observation has always been that people in public life like to be thought of as honorable—it isn’t always accurate—but they like to be thought of that way,” Koch said. “And they know that one of the things that goes into that is keeping their word.”

Bill Samuels is less enthused by what he saw come out of 2010. The million-aire and former DSCC chair was one of the people who spoke up at Koch’s first invitation-only gathering, but by then, he was already ginned up with the idea of

The Reform Movement Had Mixed Results

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Consultants Scorecard

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THE CAPITOL NOVEMBER 15, 2010 19www.nycapitolnews.comTHE CAPITOL NOVEMBER 15, 2010 19www.nycapitolnews.com

TALES OF 2010

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Now more than ever, a campaign is only as good as its consultants. And in a city overrun with commu-nication specialists and message managers, these fi rms know how to deliver wins. So while they trum-pet their wins and absorb their losses, these shops are already looking to the next election and the next breathless victory. For now, here’s how the city’s top fi rms did in 2010.

berlinrosen

Page 20: The November 18, 2010 Issue of The Capitol

www.nycapitolnews.com20 NOVEMBER 15, 2010 THE CAPITOL

BY SEN. NEIL BRESLIN

New York is home to one of the nation’s best health care sys-tems. Despite past successes in

making health care more affordable and available to New Yorkers, long-term re-form of the medical malpractice struc-ture has not yet been achieved. Consider-ing that health care costs are impacted by medical malpractice rates, it is imperative that we have a medical liability structure in place that ensures medical malprac-tice rates remain stable and appropriate, while ensuring that malpractice victims are adequately compensated, and doctors adequately protected.

New York State now has a medical

malpractice marketplace that is in severe distress. Up until this past year, when there was a modest increase, medical li-ability rates had been frozen each of the previous two years, leaving the few re-maining insurers in the marketplace thin-ly capitalized. This has the potential to limit the ability of providers to purchase affordable medical liability coverage and could leave victims of medical malprac-tice with little or no recourse.

On December 1 of 2009, I chaired a public hearing on this very important is-sue. The witness list was a diverse one. It included representatives from the in-surance industry, the medical profession, hospitals, consumer groups and trial at-torneys. Subsequent to the hearing, it

BY SEN. JAMES SEWARD

Without a doubt, our current civil justice system is in dire need of reform. As

the former chair and current ranking minority member of the Senate Insurance Committee, I am well aware of the disastrous effect that New York’s generous tort laws have had on the insurance industry. The state’s tort laws have resulted in skyrocketing insurance premiums and, in some instances, diffi culties fi nding coverage at all. While injured plaintiffs need reasonable compensation for their injuries, lawsuits should not result in a windfall—which everyone living or doing business in New York pays for through higher insurance and other costs.

To highlight just how bad our current tort system is, the California-based Pacifi c Research Institute recently released its 2010 U.S. Tort Liability Index—a state-by-state ranking of tort costs and tort laws. New York ranked 49th, giving us the dubious distinction of having the second-to-worst tort system in the United States.

The medical malpractice insurance crisis in New York highlights the need for meaningful tort reform, which is key to stabilizing premiums. While we have passed legislation to freeze medical

malpractice rates the past two years, this is nothing more than a short-term “quick fi x.” We cannot continue freezing rates year after year without running the risk of insolvency by the medical malpractice insurance carriers. We must fi nd a permanent solution.

In 2007-2008, I served as a member of the Medical Malpractice Liability Task Force, which was created in an attempt to solve the medical malpractice crisis. I remain disappointed that, despite

numerous meetings and a thorough discussion of the issue, no resolution was reached.

With my support, the Senate passed legislation in 2008 that would have reduced the primary coverage that a physician must purchase to be eligible for the excess coverage provided by the state. At the time, it was estimated that this change would reduce medical malpractice premiums by approximately 6 percent. The measure, while not a panacea, would have been a good fi rst step in reducing medical malpractice premiums and I hope that the measure is given serious consideration in the future.

Workers’ compensation insurance is another area that would benefi t greatly from tort reform. Specifi cally, I have long supported efforts to reform sections 240/241 of the labor law, i.e., the “scaffold law,” by moving from an absolute liability standard to a comparative negligence standard. Current law holds contractors and building owners to an “absolute liability” standard when workers are injured on the job, regardless of negligence on the part of the workers.

As a result of this open-ended liability, we have seen general liability insurance rates increase as well as available coverage decrease. I believe that, by moving to a comparative negligence

standard, we can reduce premiums and ensure the viability of construction contractors and subcontractors in New York.

Along the lines of tort reform, we should also be looking at ways to reduce unnecessary litigation costs, which is particularly evident in the area of no-fault automobile insurance. I am extremely concerned about the recent rise in the no-fault fraud numbers, which only leads to higher costs for policyholders.

A number of court reforms can be employed to address the problem, but the most signifi cant would be to require mandatory arbitration for certain disputed claims under the no-fault system. Mandatory arbitration would streamline the process and reduce the excessive litigation clogging the courts, particularly in New York City. Additional reforms include revising certain evidentiary rules and burdens of proof to increase effi ciency and reduce the costs of litigation.

James Seward, a Republican representing parts of Herkimer, Schoharie and Otsego counties, is ranking minority member of the Senate Insurance Committee and the past president of the National Conference of Insurance Legislators.

ISSUE FORUM LAW AND TORT REFORMNew York Has Dubious Distinction Of Second Worst Tort System In U.S.

New York’s Medical Malpractice Marketplace Is In Severe Distress

The publication for and about

New York State Government

www.nycapitolnews.com

became very apparent that if there was a solution to be reached, it would take a lot of compromise from all of the various stakeholders.

Some of what we learned was that there were very few insurers actually writing medical liability insurance in New York State, and many physicians were paying extremely high premiums, par-ticularly those practicing in more high-risk specialties, such as obstetricians and gynecologists. Balancing these concerns with the fact that victims deserve the right to be compensated when medical malpractice does in fact occur makes it very challenging to fi nd a long-term sus-tainable solution.

There were numerous proposals that were discussed during this past legisla-tive session, some focusing on insurer solvency and others aimed at trying to make the tort system more fair to poten-tial victims of medical malpractice. Ulti-mately, despite my efforts to fi nd a long-term solution, a compromise could not be reached. The superintendent of insurance did, however, grant a 6 percent increase on medical liability rates to help give in-

surers better footing. This was widely viewed as a temporary short-term fi x to the problem and not the long-term solu-tion.

Despite the many perceived obstacles in achieving real reform to the medical li-ability system here in New York, I remain committed to working with all of the various stakeholders to fi nd a solution that will help bring more insurers into the marketplace and reduce premiums for both physicians and hospitals, while making sure victims of medical malprac-tice are justly compensated.

Neil Breslin, a Democrat represent-ing Albany, is chair of the Senate’s In-surance Committee.

Page 21: The November 18, 2010 Issue of The Capitol

21

Re-Build the Economy. Lower Taxes. Make Health Care More Affordable and Available.Re-think New York’s Legal System.

www.lrany.org

In Syracuse, a small businessman can’t afford to pay his employees’ healthinsurance anymore and has to decide whether to cut benefits or let employeesgo. One key reason that insurance costs have skyrocketed in New York is the riseof the cost of medical malpractice insurance and the astronomical cost ofdefensive medicine due to aggressive lawsuits by trial attorneys.

A man stumbles off a subway platform in New York City and is injured by anoncoming subway train. He sues and, despite admitting that he had beendrinking, receives a seven-figure settlement. Later the same year, to cope withrising costs, the MTA payroll tax goes into effect, raising the cost of doingbusiness for everyone.

Women in many areas of New York have trouble finding OB/GYN doctors becauseso many are fleeing the state’s onerous and expensive medical malpracticeinsurance. This is only one example of high-risk specialists leaving New YorkState in droves.

New York’s legal system, ranked as the third-worst inthe nation by independent research firm Pacific

Research Institute, has resulted in higher taxes, lostjobs and more expensive health care.

New York’s elected leaders must address lawsuitreform in the coming session as a way to show that

New York is, once again, open for business.

Visit NineWaysToFixNewYork.com

to see how.

There’s Nothing Funny About These Lawyer JokesNew York’s Lawsuit System is No Laughing Matter.

Some jokes have no punch line.

Page 22: The November 18, 2010 Issue of The Capitol

www.nycapitolnews.com22 NOVEMBER 15, 2010 THE CAPITOL

ISSUE FORUM LAW AND TORT REFORM

BY ASSEMBLY MEMBER FELIX ORTIZ

Tort reform is an extremely complex issue that has long been a major focus of ongoing national

debate and attention. Fundamental is-sues of the right of injured parties to seek fair compensation for damages are chal-lenged by proposals to place limitations on the scope and value of awards and to affect the resulting economic impact on all stakeholders.

The need for basic elements of reform was recently highlighted in New York when, earlier this year, the Federal Dis-trict Court rejected a $657.5 million World Trade Center victims’ settlement because lawyers were to receive an excessive pro-portion of the settlement, which amount-ed to more than $200 million in contin-gency fees. These fees were judged to be excessive, as they would have served to reduce the funds available to those who suffered serious injury or loss.

Torts are usually the result of some-one’s negligence. A person causing an auto accident because of inattentiveness or a medical service provider’s inadver-tent mistake while treating a patient are common examples of tort actions. An in-dividual who commits a tort can be held responsible for his or her actions in court. In some cases the awards to injured par-ties in these civil cases can be quite sub-stantial.

Supporters of tort reform argue that awards to plaintiffs that have suffered injury are excessive and infl ated com-pared to the severity of the injury. These awards infl ate insurance and medical costs and create incentives for bringing legal actions due to high contingency fee agreements that may provide signifi cant income to law fi rms.

Opponents of reform argue that lim-its on pain and suffering awards are in-appropriate, and that the availability of contingency-based fees for legal services helps to ensure that those who have been harmed have access to the legal expertise needed to seek damages. Without the op-tion of hiring lawyers on a contingency basis, many injured individuals would have no recourse available to them.

Tort reform initiatives have varied widely from state to state. Some states have taken aggressive measures to ad-dress this issue, while others have done very little to initiate reforms.

In California, the Medical Injury Com-pensation and Reform Act of 1975 estab-lished a cap on the amount of money that injured parties can recover in medical malpractice lawsuits. MICRA limits the amount the plaintiff can recover for pain and suffering to $250,000. Such limits are often an integral part of reform proposals.

While each of these concerns merit more rigorous review, the New York ex-perience with the World Trade Center legal proceedings focuses attention on a different area of reform that addresses the very merit and fairness of award settlements and appears to lend itself to practical resolution.

New York State law currently estab-lishes a sliding attorney contingency fee scale that limits an attorney’s compensa-tion in medical malpractice claims as fol-lows: 30 percent of the fi rst $250,000 of the sum recovered; 25 percent of the next $250,000; 20 percent of the next $500,000; 15 percent of the next $250,000; and 10 percent of any amount awarded over $1.25 million.

In April of this year, I introduced leg-islation (A. 10695) in the New York State Assembly that would extend the provi-sions of the current medical malprac-tice contingency fee scale to include any claim or action involving personal dam-age, personal injury or death.

This legislation would assure that lawyers are adequately compensated for their efforts in contingency fee cases, while at the same time providing for more equitable compensation for injured parties. It would guarantee that gravely injured plaintiffs obtain a larger amount of the judgment to compensate them for their injuries or loss. This distribution re-quirement would establish basic fairness in the contingency-based fee structure in tort cases, retain incentives for law fi rms to accept meritorious cases on a contin-gency basis, and allow victims to receive just and fair compensation.

While resolution of tort reform has proven to be elusive on the national level, I believe that the limits placed on attorney fees in medical malpractice claims in New York State are an appropriate response to one element of this problem. Therefore, I plan to reintroduce legislation in the upcoming 2011 session to further extend these limits to include a broader array of claims or actions.

Felix Ortiz, a Democrat representing parts of Brooklyn, is chair of the Assem-bly Committee on Mental Health.

Tort Reform To Ensure A MoreEquitable System For Injured Parties

Page 23: The November 18, 2010 Issue of The Capitol

THE CAPITOL november 15, 2010 23www.nycapitolnews.com

And it wasn’t the Senate that did a lot these things. Should we have stood ground more? Well, yeah, except when we really stood ground and had really late bud-gets, we all got blamed. Everybody got blamed. I feel for the most part, I mean, we made mistakes and I voted against some of those mistakes even though the Repub-licans voted for it. We weren’t perfect.

TC: How would you compare Cuomo to past gover-nors?

DV: Let’s just exclude Spitzer. George’s problem was…he did great things. We cut $100 billion dollars in taxes in the first four to five years. We did a lot of things: the largest tax cuts in the history of the nation. As times got tough, George’s people started looking at New York City and saying if he’s going to proceed, he has to favor New York City more. They went for the CFE and they made deals with Sheldon Silver on pre-K, which was so expensive that he had to renege to a certain extent on his

promise, which very much ticked off Sheldon. And one thing about the Legislature is that your word is your bond. At least it used to be. You wouldn’t believe that this year. That was another thing I was fed up with. We would be told that this is never going to happen, this is dead, and so forth. And then the Hispanics say we won’t even vote un-less you do it. And the next thing you know, things would show up. It was very frustrating. That never happened to

The Capitol: Why did you decide to step down this year?Dale Volker: My wife said to me, “Look. You’ve been in Albany now 38 years. We’ve been married 40 years. It’s time for you to give me a little time.” And she made sense. So the reason was the place was so chaotic and it was really beginning to get to me psychologically and personally.

TC: Did the tea party make a difference this year?DV: I don’t think the tea party had a big impact at all. What had the impact was anti-government, people fed up with stuff. And what is not realized is that this was a terrible two years with the Democrats in power. I have to tell you that it’s hard to calculate how much spend-ing has taken place with the Democrats in power. I es-timate $4 billion to $5 billion in welfare alone, and I’m not including taxes. We voted against every tax and the budgets. And we voted against every tax and the budgets and got no credit quota at all. It is as if the Democrats ignored it, and I said to them, “You know, we fought like hell to keep taxes down,” and instead of giving us credit, they said, “Well, we don’t know if it matters.” Well, it does matter. And they are going to find out how much it matters now that we are going to take back control.

TC: To be fair, the Republicans controlled the cham-ber for 40 years. DV: First of all, you have to understand something. Was the state in bad shape when the Dems took over? No, of course not. But what really killed the state was 9/11. New York City has never recovered from 9/11, don’t let anybody kid you. Anyone tells you we’re in good shape, that’s baloney. And there was another factor: We have had a very negative Court of Appeals as far as the Legislature is concerned. I mean, really negative. They have taken power away from us. They’ve made orders, they’ve spent money. And if we didn’t have a Democratic Assembly, we would have ignored a lot of it because we could. We do not have to do those things. The [Cam-paign for Fiscal Equity] decisions were, in the opinion of many, just a money grab for New York City, and what they should have been done is order the city public school system to reform. I must tell you, that system is still—it’s better than it was, but it is still a mess. The waste of money there is unbelievable.

TC: So you think the current situation was inevita-ble?DV: We’re recovering. Did we overspend? You bet your life. The Senate tried to keep numbers down, and [George] Pataki admittedly caved in on a lot of things.

The Volker Rules

Back Forth

Back & Forth

Back & Forth&

& &

&

Blue JayL eaving Albany willingly and not in handcuffs or run out of town on a rail is a rare feat these days.

Dale Volker—whose grandfather was the finance director of Buffalo, whose father was an Assembly member during World War II and who himself, in his early days as a legislator, was once chased down

the streets of Albany by a car driven by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller—is glad to get the chance to leave on his own accord. After assuring his Western New York district was kept in Republican hands, Volker says he has little left to do than spend time with his wife and reflect on what went wrong for the past several decades in Albany.

What follows is an edited transcript.

me before. If it did happen, we would go through a huge explanation of why it happened.

TC: Is that how Pedro Espada got to be majority leader?DV: Of course. I can tell you that, years ago, I was asked by [Joe] Bruno to look at Espada’s member item stuff, because so much of it related to criminal justice and other stuff, and tell him what I thought. You can’t imag-ine what I told him. And he got furious. When he was a member, he was with us for a while. One of the reasons he wasn’t with us after that was because we said, “Oh no, we’re not going to do that stuff. It’s dangerous, it’s ethically wrong—in some cases, probably illegal.” The thing about Andrew is…you know, he’s pro-abortion and anti-death penalty and all that. But I’m talking about economics. He truly does understand that if we don’t do something with welfare or Medicaid, and this isn’t cut-ting welfare or cutting Medicaid, that’s not it. You need to reform it. I truly believe that he realizes that for the state to prosper and move on, you’ve got to do that. I think his ally is going to be Dean Skelos.

TC: No one seems that confident that things will be any easier in Albany.DV: There’s a Polish saying that says, “God punishes you.” What goes around comes around. Sooner or later, you’ll get what’s coming. That’s just me, but there’s a lot of truth to that. Politics today is completely differ-ent compared to what it was even 10 or 20 years ago. Newspapers say Albany is corrupt. It’s not Albany, its New York City. I really mean that. If you look at where the problems come from, they all come from New York City. And I want to tell you something. Many of them were there for years and its amazing to me how things happened. The story of Alan Hevesi, he’s a good friend of mine. I was asked as the chairman of the Codes Commit-tee to go down to New York City and investigate Hevesi as comptroller of New York City. People were telling me that there was a lot of stuff going on in Albany when he became comptroller. No one did anything in the city. He comes to Albany and obviously gets in all kinds of trou-ble, and I mean so much of this stuff, the Espada stuff, I mean no one upstate could get away with that.

TC: Joe Bruno was convicted of fraud, too.DV: I want to tell you something. That conviction was outrageous. Yeah, he had ethical violations. Legal viola-tions, I don’t believe it. He did some things he shouldn’t have done. But interestingly enough, the ethics rules when he began as majority leader were different than they were later on. What was really his problem was that he was hated by the New York Times and the Times Union. One of the reasons there wasn’t a local investiga-tion of the Bruno-Troopergate was because the Times Union editorial board could well have been brought in front of the grand jury to explain their part in it. But that’s between us. There’s been a lot of bad behavior in newspapers, just like in legislators. It’s another thing that’s gotten me fed up. It’s just too bad.

TC: Any words of wisdom for freshman members?DV: I’m talking to some of the newbies. My suggestion is to be very, very careful with who you deal with. I knew a lot of people. There were some people I would not deal with at all. Some lobbyists, you know. There was an attempt a couple of times and I was investigated twice. Once be-cause I criticized the system down in New York City. The problem is, there is a use of prosecutors to embarrass people for some things that are not illegal but are just not wise to do. So my advice is to keep your head up and don’t spend an awful amount of time in Albany.

—Andrew J. [email protected]

“It’s not Albany, its New York City. I really

mean that. If you look at where the problems

come from, they all come from

New York City.”

Page 24: The November 18, 2010 Issue of The Capitol

24

When Above and Beyond Is Not Enough

At the Indian Point Energy Center we not only work above and beyond to protect the

environment – we work below.

Below the mighty Hudson River, that is, where we’ve long employed special screens to

protect fish populations while generating electricity free of the carbon emissions and other

pollutants associated with climate change.

And now we are prepared to invest more than $200 million to upgrade to the smarter

solution – Wedgewire screens – to ensure that a wide range of Hudson River aquatic life,

including fish eggs and larvae, remain healthy for years to come. Our proposal for New

York’s electric customers is based on the latest research and technology and would actually

protect fish populations better than cooling towers, advocated by some, over the 20-year

license renewal period.

Wedgewire screens are placed unseen below the surface level of the Hudson River whereas

each of the cooling towers are 17 stories high and the width of Yankee Stadium.

Producing clean electricity at an affordable price is a critical part of our mission. But now

that the Hudson is healthy again, the Indian Point Energy Center is prepared to go above,

beyond and below to help keep it that way.

To learn more, visit us online at SafeSecureVital.com

Safe. Secure. Vital.

Indian Point Energy Center

EntergyThe Capitol10 x 12.75