Lew Fidler

Here’s Representative Anthony Weiner responding to a question about his management skills--and his reputation for high staff turnover--yesterday at the Crain’s business breakfast, which was before the New York Times story reported that he has run through more staff than any other member of the New York House delegation.

“I think I’m tough but I’m fair,” he said, adding, “And I'm cheap.”

In the story, Weiner chalks up his attitude to growing up in Brooklyn as a middle-class kid (always on message!).

City Councilman Lew Fidler, who also grew up middle-class in Brooklyn (and supported Freddy Ferrer over Weiner in the 2005 mayor’s race) told me, “I push my employees too and I haven’t had any turnover in six years.  read more »

Not everyone is happy with the $59.1 billion budget that Michael Bloomberg and the City Council agreed upon last night, which preserved property tax cuts and school aid by cutting funds to cultural programs and senior centers.

“I’m very dissatisfied in terms of calling it a budget negotiation,” Councilman Lew Fidler told me in an interview this morning. “A number of us went to the quote-unquote 'handshake' last night to support the speaker, but not because we thought there was a partnership with the mayor.”

Fidler said Bloomberg "wanted to raise the property taxes.”

Raising property taxes may be necessary if budget revenues continue to decline, Fidler acknowledged.  read more »

City Councilman Mike McMahon, who is running for the congressional seat Vito Fossella is vacating, was endorsed last night by the Staten Island Democratic Party.  read more »

It seems that Christine Quinn has two important factions to please. On one side are the 50 other members of the City Council. On the other are good-government groups and, particularly, The New York Times editorial board.

When Quinn began discussing the slush fund scandal at the City Council, The Times editorial board--a big voice in Democratic primaries for offices like, say, mayor--held out hope that Quinn could set things straight, writing, "[her] reformist zeal is still needed."

The first package of reforms Quinn announced, on April 11, would have stripped the City Council of the ability to determine how $20 million in discretionary money from the council speaker's office is spent, giving that power instead to the mayor's agencies. The Times called it "sensible" but added, "[S]he must do a lot more."

Then, council members objected. Loudly. Strongly.

So this week, Quinn unveiled another set of reforms that are more palatable to her members.

The major difference between Quinn's old plan and new plan is that the new plan leaves a majority of decision-making power with council members. The Times was not pleased:  read more »

Technically, Michael Bloomberg’s $59.1 billion budget increases spending -- albeit by one tenth of one percent -- but the loudest critcism it's facing so far is from officials and interest groups that want him to spend more.  read more »

Councilman Kendall Stewart helped steer taxpayer money the Donna Reid Fund, which not only shares an address in Brooklyn with Stewart's chief of staff Asquith Reid, but allegedly was used to funnel money to Reid and another staff member.

But the relationship between Reid and the Donna Reid Foundation wasn’t a secret.
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Councilman Lew Fidler spends a lot of time dealing with other people’s misfortune.

He makes his living as the general counsel for LawCash, a company that advances money to people who are expected to win personal-injury settlement suits.

More publicly, in his capacity as an elected official, Mr. Fidler is the self-appointed Chicken Little of the mortgage crisis.  read more »

Just as Christine Quinn began addressing City Council members in a closed-door meeting at City Hall about the appropriation-process reforms she proposed, another member released a statement criticizing those changes as ceding too much power to the mayor.

This is from Jimmy Vacca of the Bronx, and follows last week's sharp rebuke from John Liu and criticism from Lew Fidler:  read more »

Councilman Lew Fidler of Brooklyn has a number of concerns about the "historic reforms" Christine Quinn announced at a press conference earlier in the day. Fidler said he does not object to spirit of what Quinn said—aiming for greater transparency—but he thinks the mechanisms will harm too many small groups.

Quinn said all groups that want money from the approximately $20 million speaker's discretionary fund will have to go through the Request for Proposal (RFP) process.

"The RFP process is flawed, and it tends to favor the large, well-funded groups that can hire grant writers," Fidler said. "It's this ladder process for the use of discretionary funds that really funds the local CBOs [community-based organizations)] that aren't quite as fancy or ritzy. You know, if they don't win the RFPs ..." he added, before trailing off.  read more »

One City Councilman is defending Christine Quinn from today’s revelation that her staff misreported how taxpayer money was actually being spent. Quinn said money that went to non-existent charitable groups actually functioned as a rainy-day fund and ultimately wound up funding legitimate groups. It's a practice that appears to have predated her tenure as speaker.  read more »

Congestion pricing just passed the City Council Committee on State and Federal Legislation, 6-4. Members who voted in favor included Maria Baez, Melissa Viverito, Larry Seabrook, Joel Rivera, Mike McMahon and Hiram Monserrate. Those opposed included Lew Fidler, Joe Addabbo and Erik Dilan.

It goes to the full council tonight.

On March 8, The New York Times published a survey of where some of the City Council's 51 members stood on congestion pricing. At the time, 20 were against, 12 were for, and 19 were either undecided or did not respond to the survey.  read more »

 

Lew Fidler, a vocal critic of congestion pricing, spoke Wednesday night at the Stonewall Democratic Club in Manhattan, putting his objections to the plan in context with language borrowed from 2005 mayoral candidate Freddy Ferrer, who used to say during the campaign that New York was becoming two cities.

Fidler told Stonewall, “There is no doubt in my mind that the congestion pricing proposal, once you get past all the laudable goals that it attempts, unsuccessfully, to achieve, is just that kind of system.”

Lew Fidler is somewhat skeptical about Assemblyman Dov Hikind’s notion that Jewish voters would flock to John McCain if Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination, a claim Hikind made in the New York Post today.  read more »

After months of working on his traffic relief plan—an alternative to Michael Bloomberg's congestion pricing—Lew Fidler will introduce it to the City Council tomorrow.

Fidler is choosing tomorrow to introduce the plan because on Thursday, the commission looking at a number of traffic congestion relief plans is going to recommend one to the City Council. The Council, in turn, will vote on whether to support that plan. If they do choose one, legislators in Albany will then take up the issue.

More after the jump.  read more »

"I don't have the vaguest idea where Michael Bloomberg stands on issues of foreign policy," Councilman Lew Fidler told me recently when I asked what he thought of the increasingly loud talk of a Bloomberg '08 bid. "There are a dozen other issues and I don't know what his positions are."

"How can I even begin to assess him as a candidate?" he asked.

Fidler went on, "His vision on environmental issues is Al Goreian. It is where I would want to be. But there are so many other things. What is his position on the federal budget? Is he going to turn into a Reagan Republican? I don't know, because we really haven't heard that from Michael Bloomberg."

Then he added, "When Giuliani was mayor, we had a foreign policy. Michael Bloomberg has restricted his foreign policy to Nassau County."

 

The fight to revoke the nearly $11 million tax break enjoyed by the owners of Madison Square Garden, who also own the Knicks and the Rangers, is on. Both Michael Bloomberg and Christine Quinn want it gone, as do a number of other politicians. This morning, Councilman Lew Fidler distributed this top 10 list of things the owners can do with the money from the tax break:

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Here's Councilman Lew Fidler, the Chicken Little of the subprime mortgage crisis, explaining how Michael Bloomberg is now joining the Council's efforts to solve this problem.

We’re trying to keep the turkey and fowl references to a minimum, but couldn’t pass this up.

It’s an odd flier circulating among City Council members about the perils of mortgages and home foreclosures, an issue that officials like Lew Fidler have been talking about for some time. The flier, created by Fidler, was his way of garnering support for his budget initiative to help families with mortgage troubles.

The lesson Fidler is preaching here is that the Chicken Littles, sometimes, are right.  read more »

Lew Fidler isn’t supporting Michael Bloomberg’s traffic reduction plan, which hinges on congestion pricing. In fact, tonight, Fidler will introduce his own plan to reduce traffic which features an idea Bloomberg had already opposed: building the Cross Harbor Tunnel.

But when I spoke with Fidler outside City Hall this morning, he gave the mayor some credit for addressing the issue of traffic.

“As opposed as I am to congestion pricing as an idea, the fact that the mayor proposed it was a good thing because it really forced us to focus on some real serious problems in our city,” said Fidler. He said he thinks the mayor is simply taking the "wrong approach.”

About 30 minutes before the panel considering Michael Bloomberg's plan for congestion pricing holds its hearing in Brooklyn next Thursday, City Councilman Lew Fidler will welcome them by introducing a counterproposal.

His plan, Fidler just told me, calls for creating a tunnel to connect Staten Island to the city’s subway system, sinking the Gowanus Expressway underground, and creating the long-discussed Cross Harbor Tunnel.

“I’ve been working on this since June,” Fidler told me.  read more »

Here are a couple of visible reminders (from this morning) of the upcoming special election for the Yvette Clarke council seat.

While this race has gotten relatively little attention -- compared with, say, the $5 million special Senate election in Nassau this week -- it has, at least, prompted a number of influential figures within the party to take a rooting interest.

Clarke, who gave up the seat when she was elected to congress, is backing Dr. Mathieu Eugene; Councilman Lew Fidler, Rock Hackshaw and other notable Brooklyn operatives are backing Wellington Sharpe; the formidable Kevin Wardally, of Bill Lynch Associates, has contributed money to Jennifer James.

Eleven more days.

-- Azi Paybarah

At least there was some pay-off for those who sat through an hour’s worth of people finding 44 ways to say yes.

During today's floor "debate" on land-use changes for Yankee Stadium, Council Member Lew Fidler blurted out: "As a lifelong Democrat, I always found it hard to accept that the Yankees are in fact owned by a Watergate felon." When fellow councilors groaned, he added, "Facts are facts."  read more »

So here's an odd moment in the annals of journalism: A City Council Member, Lew Fidler of Brooklyn, gave an on-the-record cell phone interview to the anonymous blogger who's been covering the Speaker's race on this site.

"She was ... the term that was used most often -- in a positive way -- the lowest common denominator," he told his anonymous interlocutor of the Speaker-select, Chris Quinn.

I asked Fidler how he felt about giving an interview to an anonymous reporter. He said he didn't seem much problem with it.

"He called me," Fidler said. "I said, 'Oh my goodness, your phone number just came up on caller ID.' He said, 'No it didn't,' and I said, 'No, I'm just busting your balls.'"  read more »

"The blog was entertaining," Fidler added. And speaking to the blogger "wasn't the leap of faith. The leap of faith was when I sent my credit card information to them so I could buy T-shirts and mugs."

The New Brooklyn leader, Vito Lopez, is trying to make his traditionally disunited borough a player in the race for City Council Speaker.

He's calling a meeting of the borough's Council delegation at his Bushwick club later this month, in hopes of convincing the two Brooklyn candidates -- Bill de Blasio and Lew Fidler -- to hash out their differences before the full Council votes.

"We haven't had a speaker from Brooklyn since Tom Cuite," Lopez told The Politicker. "I want to come up with a rule and a manner how we can unite and come out and have the majority."

Brooklyn, he pointed out, is the largest of the boroughs.  read more »

"If we can get 12 or 14 votes, it makes us a principal player. It puts us in a situation where it's almost hard for us to not be a player."

Brooklyn sources tell us that Vito Lopez has locked up the county leader's job in Brooklyn.

A couple of quick pieces of analysis: On one level, this has some meaning for the speaker's race. It's a win for Lew Fidler, a Lopez ally, and a loss for Bill de Blasio.  read more »

On a broader level, the ascendency yet of another part of the borough's machine is a sign of just how weak Brooklyn's reform movement remains inside party circles, their consolation being that the party regularly loses at the polls.

UPDATE: Joe Bova calls in to warn The Politicker not to count chickens. "Far from a done deal," he says.

At first glance, rolling back term limits in the City Council seems like an incredibly impolitic act: it would contervene a referendum, and draw down the unceasing wrath of various editorial boards and other sages.

So why is it now seen as all but guaranteed that the City Council will act to extend, if not de-limit, its members terms next year? The answer is the race for speaker.

One candidate, David Weprin of Queens, has already assured potential supporters that he's open to revising term limits. Another, Chris Quinn of Manhattan, is on the record as opposing term limits outright. I wasn't able immediately to determine the positions of Bill de Blasio and Lew Fidler of Brooklyn on the issue.

The point is that candidates for speaker have to promise something, and little is as valuable to people as their jobs. So look for the candidates to compete in offering strong anti-term limits proposals, ranging from the weakest, extending them another term by referendum; through doing the same thing legislatively; through a referendum on abolishing them entirely.  read more »

"It's an issue that's on the minds of a lot of members," Weprin told The Politicker, adding that he expected it to wait until a new Council takes office in January. "It's a major part of the agenda."

A key element in Gifford Miller's surprise rise to City Council Speaker was money. He rounded it up in his East Side district, and spread it around to grateful colleagues and candidates.

Four years later, Speaker wannabes are, to varying degrees, following his lesson, though the wise men and women are cautioning us that the same trick may not work twice.

Melinda Katz -- the Council's land-use czarina, which is kind of like being from the East Side as far as fundraising ability goes -- leads the pack, but don't miss crafty Lew Fidler, who has been spreading money around via an obscure committee called Friends of Lew Fidler IV, theoretically established for his candidacy for District Leader. While the others' records are online, Fidler's move sent us down to the Board of Elections to get ink on our hands.

Here are the totals, through the end of last year, on transfers from Council members to candidates and colleagues who will still be around next year:  read more »

Melinda Katz: $8,050 Christine Quinn: $6,450 David Weprin: $4,500 Lew Fidler: $3,150 ($2,750 through Friends of Lew Fidler IV) Bill De Blasio: $3,100 Leroy Comrie: $0 Quinn has also been generous with some of the pressure groups that helped push Miller over the top. She transferred $3,000 to the Working Families Party, and $2,500 to the liberal advocacy group ACORN. Fidler, for his part, gave a -- in some circles -- rather impolitic $150 last year to Councilman Hiram Monserrate, Co-Chair of the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus, and perpetual thorn in the side of the Queens Democratic Party.