Jonathan Rosen

With all the talk about Sheldon Silver's efforts during the congestion pricing fight to keep his members happy, it's easy to overlook the fact that he's been quietly tending to his other constituents—the ones who will, barring a shock upset, vote to return him to his seat on the Lower East Side later this year.

A reader passed along this ad for Silver, which appeared in this week’s issue of Downtown Express.

A spokesman for Silver’s campaign said it was paid for by the campaign and ads like this have appeared throughout the past decade. (His campaign finances show he has run ads as early as February in any given year.)

Silver is facing two Democratic primary challengers this year, and may have inspired a billionaire mayor (and his top political aide) to look at the race anew.

Here's spokesman Jonathan Rosen's e-mailed explanation:  read more »

In case you were wondering, the departure of State Democratic Party co-chair Dave Pollak does not mean Hillary Clinton's superdelegate count is down. That's because Pollak, a committed Clinton superdelegate, will be replaced by Reggie LaFayette, who is now the party’s second highest-ranking member.

In other words, this is different than the unexpected departure of Eliot Spitzer. David Paterson was already a superdelegate for Clinton, so his ascension to governor resulted in the net-loss of one.  read more »

After his press conference this morning, Eliot Spitzer took one on-topic question and departed, leaving reporters with queries on and more than a few topics. And although he is expected to make a few remarks at his major fund-raiser tonight, a spokesman for Spitzer said the governor will not take questions from reporters.

Unlike the usual arrangement with Spitzer fund-raisers, communications firm Berlin Rosen is handling the media for tonight's event. (The same firm also works for the state Democratic Party). Jonathan Rosen, a principal at the firm, told me the they are not on retainer with the Spitzer 2010 campaign, but are working “on an as-needed basis.”

This is, apparently, a time of need.

Boy, are the New York Democrats looking forward to the convention.

Here's an email from Jonathan Rosen about hotel assignments for the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver:

Dear Usual Suspects,
 
Remember that moment when you found out your dorm assignment and the name of your roommate.  Me too.  Brett Hall.  Dan Ross.
 
This is sort of like that except it involves knowing which lobby bar in Denver you will be inhabiting in late August, 2008.
 
Today the Democratic National Convention Committee (DNCC) made hotel assignments.  Regardless of who gets nominated, we’ve got room keys. 
 
The NY delegation will be staying at the Adams Mark Hotel at 1550 Court Pl in Downtown Denver.  In a rekindling of other epic East Coast / West Coast rivalries (think Tupac / Biggie, June O’Neill / Robert Dornan) the California delegation will also be staying there.   

The rest of the email is after the jump.  read more »

The latest round of stories questioning Joe Bruno's use of state aircraft is making it a little easier for state Democrats to push their argument that it's Bruno, not Eliot Spitzer, who has been behaving suspiciously.

As consultant Jonathan Rosen told me on IM just now, "I think it made clear that Joe Bruno is a hypocrite with questionable ethics who has abused taxpayer dollars since you and I were in junior high school."

(In case you're wondering: for me, junior high was 1990 to 1992. Bruno became the Majority Leader of the state Senate in 1995. But you get the point.)

The state Democratic Party has just gone one step past the Whitewater analogy, reaching for another recent American lowlight to characterize the ongoing Republican pursuit of Eliot Spitzer.

Here's a statement from consultant Jonathan Rosen in response to Republican state Senator George Winner's call for another hearing:

“These guys just don’t know when to quit. The Senate Republicans holding an ethics hearing is like O.J. searching for the real killer. Senate Republicans should end the partisan theatrics and join the Governor in getting back to work on the real issues that matter to working families. Let’s end the show trial, leave the investigating to the investigators, and get back to work.”

I've got a story in this week's paper looking at how the state Democrats are unrolling a coordinated response to the continuing Republican probe into Eliot Spitzer's Brunogate problems by branding it the new Whitewater.

“I think you saw in the 90’s a sort of never-ending investigation of Bill Clinton, and it created a widespread national consensus in support of Bill Clinton, and people who were bringing these charges get tossed out of power,” said Democratic consultant Jonathan Rosen, who was recently hired by the state Democratic Party.

Roger Stone, the former CREEP operative who currently works for the Senate Republicans, seemed amused at the analogy. “We also tried to say that Watergate was a third-rate burglary,” he said.

Today's coverage of a critical report from the Coalition for the Homeless neatly highlighted the potential risks of the Bloomberg administration's unusual decision to offer regular data-based progress reports on its various policy goals and campaign promises.

As spokesman Stu Loeser hastened to point out yesterday, it was only the city's data that enabled advocates to create the report, which shows in black-and-white terms that the city has fallen short of the benchmarks the mayor set in reducing chronic homelessness.

"We told them," he said. "It's our numbers. We gave it to them."

You have to say one thing, assuming the administration's numbers are correct: they're certainly willing to take their lumps in the interests of data-based transparency.

Will the prospective candidates for 2009 pledge to do the same?

UPDATE: Jonathan Rosen, a spokesman for the homeless advocacy group, doesn't think Bloomberg deserves that much credit for transparency. He emailed to say, "The Coalition for the Homeless has received daily census reports on homeless adults since 1981 and monthly reports on homeless families since the mid 1980's." -- Azi Paybarah

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has reached a compromise with a dissident faction of City Council members that had pushed for ending tax breaks for market-rate real estate developers.

The compromise, reached on Tuesday morning, will expand the so-called exclusion zone for the 421-a multifamily housing tax incentive to more parts of East Harlem, Carroll Gardens, Sunset Park, and Bushwick, meaning that new buildings in those areas will only receive tax abatements if they include affordable housing, Jonathan Rosen, a spokesman for Housing Here & Now, a coalition of housing advocacy groups, told The Real Estate.

He said, in addition, the compromise bill requires developers who tap into the city's new $400 million affordable housing trust fund to keep their units affordable for 50 years or provide for them to be sold to tenants or to the city.

Quinn came Tuesday morning to the 20-odd members who had backed a stronger reform bill by David Yassky and Annabel Palma and asked for nine of their votes, according to an individual briefed on the conversation. Quinn already had a majority of Council members behind her bill, but needed more in order to prevent the appearance of a sharply divided Council. (Most Council votes pass unanimously or nearly so.)

It is unclear just how many of the 20 will support Quinn, but reportedly enough of them will. Another source said that some Council members are still trying to get further concessions, including a requirement that developers would need to make 30 percent of units in core Manhattan affordable to low- and middle-income folks, instead of the current 20 percent, in order to qualify for tax breaks.  read more »

- Matthew Schuerman

Last night’s panel on Atlantic Yards, sponsored by Women in Housing and Finance, was painful and frankly not terribly informative. (You can check out blogger Norman Oder’s play-by-play here.) But following up, we received a statement today from developer Forest City Ratner spokesman Joe DePlasco, who said: “We have also agreed to build on or off site 600 to 1,000 first-time homeowner condos and will continue to work with ACORN on this and related issues.”

That’s news—assuming that “first-time homeowners” would be low- or middle-income families. In the agreement signed last May, Ratner and ACORN said only that they would “work on a program to develop affordable for-sale units, which are intended to be in the range of 600 to 1,000 units.”  read more »

There's a press conference about to get underway on the City Hall steps I'd initially mistaken for some kind of new think tank, but which instead look the kind of threat to the Senate GOP that had, heretofore, existed only in Kevin Sheekey's imagination.

This one isn't funded by Bloomberg, but by the Leeds publishing family. It's called NY EdPAC, and while it's technically a non-partisan, independent expenditure campaign, the targets of a promised $3 million in spending are Senate Republicans who won't commit to send state money to city schools per the Campaign for Fiscal Equity decision.

The consultants on the campaign are Valerie Berlin and Jonathan Rosen; they ran the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee's successful 2004 efforts. Their presence here, rather than with the Senate Democratic organization, suggests that this will be the main anti-GOP push.

Just what Joe Bruno needed.

All this fresh air around the race for City Council Speaker seems to be causing a bit of discomfort around -- gasp! -- policy issues. Housing Here and Now, a coalition of tenants' groups, just announced that two of the Speaker candidates with (relatively) pro-landlord records, Leroy Comrie and Melinda Katz, pulled out of their forum tonight.

"While it's great that the leading candidates for speaker will be there, it's too bad that the other candidates chose to withdraw their support and I'm sure tenants will want to know why," Housing Here and Now spokesman Jonathan Rosen told The Politicker, adding that he hopes all the candidates participate.  read more »

Candidates are expected to be grilled on their stance on several bills, including one that would extend "421a" affordable housing to new neighborhoods. And one imagines that it would be no fun to tell the room of 1,000 tenants things they don't want to hear.

Valerie Berlin and Jonathan Rosen are leaving the offices of the State Senate Democrats to start their own, currently nameless, political consulting shop.

The move is notable in that these are rare Democrats on something of a winning streak. Berlin was the strategist in last year's pickup of three seats for the Democrats in the Senate; Rosen was her deputy at the State Democratic Senate Campaign Committee.  read more »

We're told that Senate Minority Leader David Paterson is likely to be a client.