Governance Hijacked by Partisanship

The Peekskill News has learned that Mayor-elect Mary Foster’s intent to appoint a Republican to fill her vacated seat has been nixed by the Democratic Party Machine. Foster is reportedly frustrated that even after being elected Mayor, she lacks the power to make a single decision on her own. Her predecessor, John Testa, made his political name by bucking the Party authority and acting on principle. Foster has no such moral backbone. Instead, she has allowed the process of selecting her replacement on the Common Council, as well as replacements for City boards, to be subcontracted to Marina Ciotti, a declared Democratic partisan, who was the treasurer of Patricia Salvate-Riley’s campaign. Councilwoman-elect Riley has shown poor judgment by agreeing with Foster that politics should influence governmental issues.

But will Mayor-elect Foster Act in a Nonpartisan Fashion?

The Peekskill News has received a tip from a source close to Mayor-elect Mary Foster, who claims that she intends to appoint a Republican to the Council seat she vacated, a dramatic move aimed to demonstrate that she is serious about putting an end to partisan politics in Peekskill.

Yesterday, at Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors’ School for inexperienced leaders, Foster spoke out against politics driven by partisanship instead of the issues.

While we are disappointed that Foster has chosen to use a closed, anti-democratic process to choose her successor, our disappointment will be muted somewhat if Foster actually acts on what she has said.

We hope our source is accurate. Come January 1, 2008, we will learn whether Foster is going to take our City in a new direction, or whether she intends to continue down the road of divisive partisanship.

The definition of “open” vs. the politics of the smoke-filled room

Everyone knows what the word “open” means.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition), the word “open” has been used for more than eleven hundred years to mean “exposed to the general view or knowledge,” “acting in public without concealment… spec. government in which the public is kept well-informed and is invited to participate.” Of the more than fifty senses of the word “open” discussed on more than eight-and-a-third pages in the OED, only three other senses of “open” have been around as long: (i) unenclosed, open space; (ii) an open door; and (iii) “brought to light,” revealed, exposed. For at least eleven centuries, the desire of people to participate in government has been expressed with the word “open.”

But to the North County News, etymology and history begin anew every day with the latest press release they receive from Peekskill’s new partisan majority. This week, the paper asked Mayor-elect Mary Foster to share with the public how her replacement is being selected. “Foster refused to get into specifics and would not say who they are interviewing,” the paper reports. They then quote Darren Rigger as saying, “We want the process to be open and deliberate.”

The paper doesn’t question Rigger’s assertion that the process is open.

But exactly what is open about this process? Did they solicit resumes from the public at large? Have they made the specifics of the process public? We have talked with most of the civically involved non-registered, Independent, and Republicans in town, many of whom are thoughtful independent-minded people, and none of them have been included in the process. Foster and Rigger's partisan website doesn't post any information for interested parties.

This is troubling for at least two reasons.

First, Foster herself is not a registered member of any political party. She has contributed to the campaigns of Republicans like Vito Fossella, who wants to eliminate the Estate tax for the ultra-rich, while many billionaires agree that "repealing the estate tax would enrich the heirs of America's millionaires and billionaires while hurting families who struggle to make ends meet.” Foster is a supporter of Republican Fossella, so why is she so committed to having a Democrat replace her?

Second, Foster went out of her way in the final weeks of the campaign to tell voters that she promised to end partisanship as we know it in Peekskill. On November 4^th, Foster told a packed room these very things. The other day, we were forwarded an email that was circulated shortly after that meeting. An eyewitness from the meeting was telling people the Sunday before the election, "[Foster] has expressed a strong willingness to work with all parties & people... I think the evil party in the Dem propaganda [sic] is not Mary, but Darren Rigger. He's running the machine."

Time has exposed the falsity of Foster’s seductive campaign promises. Foster is now in charge, and she is giving Darren Rigger his marching orders. The two of them have agreed to shut out the people of Peekskill from the process of selecting the replacement for the only Council seat held by someone unregistered with any political party, someone who has made sizeable contributions to both major parties.

Foster’s process appears to be no different than the politics of the smoke-filled room of days gone bye. One this is clear: her process is not open.

Read Bazzo, but tell him to reconsider

North County News Columnist Anthony Bazzo nearly has it right in his latest column, “Zeroing in on Peekskill’s tax-happy Dems.” We encourage you to buy the paper and read his analysis of the City’s latest budget. The one place he errs is in promising to congratulate “the new supermajority of Democrats” if they fulfill their campaign promises, like hiring new police and fireman, by raising taxes next year.

On this point, his opinion has been shaped by his good friend Darren Rigger, who is a self professed tax-and-spend liberal.

No one running on the Democratic ticket ever said they agreed with Rigger’s profligacy. Indeed, having listened to the new majority, and having received and read all of their campaign literature, not once did they say they would have to raise taxes to deliver their promises.

To the contrary, they implied, when they didn’t flatly state, that they would complete Target and other commercial developments in the City that would increase revenue far more than they would consume in new City services.

They promised increasing services in a revenue-neutral manner.

Everyone we have talked to understood the same.

Mr. Bazzo, if you disagree, put aside Rigger for a moment, and get the opinion of a businessman like Councilman-elect Joe Schuder.

A Roadmap to Target and Lowe's

The current consensus among residents is that the new majority of Peekskill’s Common Council must reject the Target deal because Target wants the national home improvement retailer Lowe's to be their neighbor, and the new majority made support of Dain’s Lumber, the archetypal Mom-and-Pop business that is falling prey to unstoppable market forces, a cornerstone of their campaign.

And yet there is a way. Consider this. The first vote is Councilwoman Cathy Pisani, who has always supported the deal. The second vote is Councilman-elect Joe Schuder, who campaigned on the notion that we must increase revenue before we increase spending. Target-Lowe's is the most easily accomplished measure to boost City revenue imaginable.

The third vote is a little harder, but nonetheless doable. Don Bennett voted for Target the first time around, but then during the campaign, made it clear that he would oppose any threat to Dain’s Lumber. This might have been mere campaign braggadocio, and Bennett could credibly continue to support Target since Lowe's has a very different business model from Dain’s.

But if Bennett doesn’t back the Target-Lowe's combination, then Councilwoman-elect Patty Riley just might. She too spoke up in defense of Dain’s. But Riley has no political history. Early in the campaign, she reportedly had second thoughts about her party’s past opposition to redeveloping Peekskill because she genuinely wants to help our City. As a newcomer, Riley could claim it’s time to put sentiment aside, acknowledge reality, and move the City forward with Target and Lowe's.

We believe Riley is the third vote.

So how do we get to the fourth vote?

Mary Foster’s unfilled seat.

Many believe that Ruth Wells or a sitting School Board member will be appointed to Foster’s seat. While it is still anyone’s guess at this point, the smart political move would be to appoint someone – anyone – who is committed to delivering the fourth vote on Target and Lowe's. Don’t forget that Foster has embarked on a career change, and if she wants to stay alive politically, she has no choice but to bring Target and Lowe's to Peekskill before the next election. No amount of spin can rescue her in two years from rejecting this deal.

At the same time, Foster needs political cover, since she has gone on record saying that she would not allow Lowe's to locate in the area that had once been considered as the site for a new and re-invented Dain’s. This cover comes in one of two ways. The least likely is, Jeff Dain goes on record saying that he’s changing his line of business since the real estate he owns is worth more than his business model.

The more likely scenario is, Foster appoints a Target-Lowe's supporter to the Common Council. Once there are 4 votes in favor, Foster will claim she wants to “shape” the deal, and she’ll “negotiate” some irrelevant element of the plan, so she can claim in her next campaign that she was the one looking out for Peekskill.

This is how Foster can split the baby and survive.

The only roadblock on this roadmap to Target and Lowe's is hubris. If Foster and her party believe the opposition is dead, and will not be able to field a credible candidate to oppose her in two years, then she can afford to break every promise she made during the campaign. But she does this at the risk of having the opposition re-cycle her own campaign literature next election.

In two years, will we be asking, Where is all the development? and calling to elect someone who can get the job done?

Deception, Distraction, and Democracy

Kathleen Hall Jamieson writes in Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy, "In politics as in life, what is known is not necessarily what is believed, what is shown is not necessarily what is seen, and what is said is not necessarily what is heard."

We have political consultants (and human nature) to thank for this. Consultants get paid a lot of money to distract people from the truth. Like advertisers, they distort facts and appeal to emotions. But there is no “Truth in Advertising” law for politics. Our only remedy when politicians lie to us, is to vote them out of office. And this requires an organized effort because political consultants spend equal amounts of time subtly persuading certain constituencies not to vote, and putting the fear of God into others to guarantee their vote.

For example, this past fall, the Democrats were very effective in persuading traditional, family-values Republicans not to vote. They did this by repeatedly reminding people about the sexual orientation of the GOP candidate, and claiming that he would use his powers as the Mayor to turn Peekskill into a destination for gay marriage.

The Democrats were even more effective at persuading residents of public housing that the GOP wanted to tear down Bohlmann Towers and turn it into condos. Since only HUD has the power to do such a thing, the claim had no basis in fact.

But the Democrats did all they could to perpetuate this falsehood, and exploit the fears of people down on their luck. On Channel 12 News, then candidate Mary Foster fuelled this fear by saying, “Certainly there is no plan by the Democratic Party to remove Bohlmann Towers,” implying that there was a Republican plan to do so. In 1797, William Corbett wrote in the Porcupine's Gazette, "A falsehood that remains uncontradicted for a month, begins to be looked upon as a truth." The GOP never effectively countered the falsehood. And the only convincing way to do so would have been to meet with residents and get the truth out there.

The truth could have hurt the Democrats greatly, especially insofar as they publicly supported the Executive Director of the Peekskill Housing Authority, even after HUD had found that he had violated many regulations and guidelines to the detriment of public housing residents. But again, the message needed to be conveyed in person.

We expect that the tactics the Democrats used to keep the PHA an issue for so many months this past year, will become the template for how issues will be handled by the new administration. We also expect the incoming administration to try to keep the PHA in the forefront of the news to distract people from campaign promises that are about to be broken.

It is now being said that the new majority of the Common Council will reject Target’s attempt to locate on the Karta site, where candidate Foster said she wanted it, because Target will only build there if Lowe's, another national retailer, locates across the street. This deal, if completed, will bring the assessment back to where it was before the latest tax certiorari.

If the new majority does in fact kill the Target deal, they will have no one to blame but themselves for the lack of revenue growth.

Revenue Follows Growth, not Just Taxes; Is the Need for More Police Axiomatic?

Today’s editorial in The North County News appears to have been run through a spin machine. It’s as if the newspaper didn’t even listen to the Mayoral debates that they published on their own website. Had the NCN editors been paying attention, they would not have written what they did.

As a mayoral candidate, Mary Foster complained that she had just been handed a 2008 budget that called for a 5% tax increase, when the City is sitting on unprecedented surpluses. She made it very clear that if the budget vote had been held before the election, she would have recommended the same measure she did in 2006 – spending some of the surplus to get to no tax increase.

When viewed in the context of Foster’s well-documented campaign promises (you can hear her own words here, thanks to another blogger), the NCN editorial board’s missive is nothing more than partisan propaganda.

Speaking as partisans, the NCN editorial board derides Peekskill’s zero-percent tax increase as a political vendetta, and then says that budgets should be passed before the election. This is naïve. Had the budget vote been held before the election, Mary Foster would have voted for a zero percent tax increase, given everything she said during her campaign.

Even more naïve is the NCN’s contention that the budget didn’t collect “any additional revenue at all—not even the cost of inflation”. Listen to the debates, and Mary Foster says quite clearly that Peekskill will have an operating profit in 2008. If that isn’t additional revenue, then what is?

More to the point, the NCN fails to appreciate a basic economic fact: the City can raise, and has raised, additional revenue without raising taxes. We have been doing this for years through redevelopment. All Mayor-elect Foster and her team need do come January is allow Target and Lowe's to move to Lower South Street. Also, the Gateway Project can now move forward since it is no longer in the Democrats’ interest to exploit public housing residents as they have for the past year.

Another element of political spin in the NCN editorial is the implication that it is axiomatic that Peekskill needs more police officers. The Peekskill Police Department is at its highest deployment in history. Violent crime in Peekskill has been decreasing for years, but print newspapers, which use fear to drive sales, keep their focus on negative stories. It’s not surprising that the NCN would rely on prejudice and fear to lend credibility to their editorial.

We challenge the NCN to provide objective evidence as to why Peekskill needs more police than it has ever had in history. Don Bennett’s opinion, and the opinion of a bureaucrat looking to expand his domain, is far from objective. It should only cost five to ten thousand dollars to hire an expert who can show the Peekskill Police Department how to get more officers on the beat (the political motivation behind the purported need for more police) without adding additional personnel. Trimming that small amount from the current budget can and should easily be accomplished. One thing is clear: The Police Department should not be turned into a political football, as some are now attempting to do.

First Pre-election Promise Broken. Will it be the last?

Readers of the North County News today are likely to be confused by an article discussing Peekskill’s third zero percent tax increase in row. Mayor-elect Mary Foster is quoted as saying she wanted a “4.5 percent tax increase” instead of no tax increase.

This is puzzling for many reasons. First, before the election, Foster said she was against a 5% tax increase because we have such a large fund balance. She promised to advocate drawing down the reserves, just as she had recommended last year. And had the budget vote been taken before the election, Foster would have pointed out, quite rightly, that the 2006 budgeted operating revenue was a little more than $29 million. The $6 million reserve we are now sitting on is more than 20% of that operating revenue. And when you consider that the New York Courts knocked down that revenue even further in their latest tax certiorari, the City is well within the parameters of its fund balance policy.

Second, Foster said during her Channel 12 debate with Bill Schmidt that we tend to get “sandbagged” by tax increases, only to find that operating profits deliver a surplus in the following year. She went on to predict operating profits for the City in 2007 and 2008. So why is Foster trying, in her own words, to sandbag us now?

Also puzzling: what does the Mayor-elect mean by “keep the two cops”? Logically, if two positions haven’t been filled in over two years, then you aren’t getting rid of anyone. Practically, all bureaucrats know that if you don’t spend what you have been budgeted, you are in danger of losing that money the next go round. And everyone who has ever been on a budget committee knows, it’s a virtual certainty that you don’t get more than one bite at the apple of unspent money. Spend it or lose it, as they say.

Ironically, the zero percent budget was achieved by enacting spending cuts that Democrats had proposed in the past. Council members Don Bennett and Drew Claxton opposed the creation of the Department of Public Information when it was first proposed. This past campaign, Democrats were calling for the elimination of the public information officer’s position. One would think they would applaud these cuts now.

We detect a tone of bitterness in Foster’s allegation that the zero percent tax increase this year will "force" her to raise taxes next year. This doesn’t make sense. First of all, the issue isn’t about her; it's about taxpayers. We recently paid $3.69 a gallon for heating oil. Our taxes are going up everywhere else. It’s nice to know that someone in government is looking out for us.

But a tax increase next year is not inevitable if Foster makes good on her promises regarding development. If she gets Target and Lowe's to locate on Lower South Street, which she can do in the next few months, they’ll be up and running before the Fall, adding a good chunk of revenue. As she said during the campaign, commercial development is best because it doesn’t consume as much in City services as residents do. The Gateway Project is also ready to begin, so she'll have new revenue from that.

We hope that Mayor-elect Foster drops the complaining attitude, and simply rolls up her sleeves and gets the job done that she promised. If she is as successful as her predecessor, next year at this time, she'll be announcing the fourth zero percent tax increase in a row to great applause.

And now we move on

November 6th brought us one of the closest mayoral races in Peekskill’s history. The campaign got unseemly at the end, with both sides slinging mud as fast as they could throw it. But in the end, a well-funded ground game on Election Day brought out all of Bohlmann Towers to vote, which turned the City over to the Democrats.

Thank heavens, it's over. Now we can get back to the important work of making Peekskill a better City.

Everyone is talking about what happens next.

Ginsburg has already abandoned the Standard House, and is now reconsidering whether to move forward with the Abbey at Fort Hill. After the nasty mailings and comments coming from the Peekskill Democrats in the final weeks of the election, castigating the man who just gifted the City forty acres of prime real estate, Ginsburg might just sell his property and walk away.

The next big question is, what will happen to the composition of City Hall? Who will the Democrats choose to fill Mary Foster’s vacant seat? Chances are it will be someone with name recognition, because whoever it is can only serve until November 2008, at which time they will face re-election. City Manager Dan Fitzpatrick’s name keeps coming up in Naples, Florida’s search for a new City Manager, so it would be no surprise if he moved on. Comptroller Marcus Serrano has received many job offers, given his contributions to the turnaround of Peekskill’s financial fortunes, so it would not be surprising to see him get recruited by Mount Vernon or New Rochelle.

The Democrats campaigned on rejecting Republican plans for redeveloping the City, so the most vulnerable position in City Hall has to be Director of Planning and Development Brian Havranek. Long time Democrat Deborah Post is expected to be named to his position in early January.

One of the best pieces of news that was uncovered during the campaign is that Mary Foster has had a change of heart and now supports Target. She and her team will have an opportunity to make good on this promise in the next three months. Peekskill eagerly awaits them to approve the plans that will change Lower South Street for the better, and put the Karta property to much better use.

But first, the Common Council must pass the 2008 budget. We were heartened to hear Mary Foster say during the Cortlandt Colonial debate that she would reject the 5% tax increase proposed by the City because we are sitting on a fund balance that is higher than any municipality in Westchester County.

We only wish the budget had been passed before the election. Then a unanimous Council would have passed a zero percent tax increase. It would have been a nice symbolic act of unity, washing away the divisive acrimony of the campaign.