With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir (16 page)

Now it was time to get to work. I had had plenty of opportunities to watch Gifford Miller do his job as Speaker. I had a clear understanding of the responsibilities and had filed away important lessons that I’d learned from observing, but the new job involved a different order of demands and decisions from what I was accustomed to. It wasn’t just that I went from having a staff of six to a staff of three hundred. Or that I was now responsible for deciding who on that staff stayed and who had to go and who served on which committees and who got which committee chair assignments. It was all of that, in combination with stepping onto a fast-moving conveyor belt that didn’t stop for anyone. Remember that
I Love Lucy
episode when she works on the conveyor belt boxing chocolates? That’s how I felt.

The city runs on an annual calendar, and when I took office in January 2006, I had no choice but to jump in, hang on, and get up to speed as fast as I could. For a self-described perfectionist, this was a prescription for very long days and too many sleepless nights. But I wasn’t about to complain.

Well before my swearing-in as the first female and first gay Speaker of the City Council, I knew what kind of Speaker I intended to be. My bottom-line belief in government is that it should be responsive to the needs of
all
of the people, which meant that as Speaker of the New York City Council, I represented the interests of all New Yorkers in all five boroughs, from small business owners in Brooklyn and the elderly rent-controlled tenant in the Bronx to the owner of the brokerage house on Wall Street, the homeowner in Queens, the car service driver on Staten Island, and the housing authority residents on the Lower East Side.

Sometimes the energy to make changes comes from the people you know, people whose relationships and stories are often indelible. Take, for example, my friend Jackie Adams, who lost two sons to gun violence. One died in Baltimore, and the other in Harlem. She had asked her son to go to the deli to get milk, and he never came home. I love her. This woman has formed a group called Harlem Mothers Save. They meet every Wednesday night in Harlem, and it’s a support group for mothers who’ve lost kids to gun violence. In the face of this loss, she’s the most positive woman you’ll ever meet in your life. She is fighting for her community.

Early in my term as Speaker, Harlem was suffering from a plague of gang-initiated graffiti, which included an image of a rat holding up a sign that said “Stop Snitching.” Jackie called and asked if she could see me. I said, “Sure, sure.” And she came to the office and sat down in a big governmental club chair that swallowed her tiny self up. She told me about the “Stop Snitching” signs, and we decided we had to do something. We went with other mothers and painted over all the graffiti. But what touched me was when she asked, “Can I tell the women on Wednesday that you’re with us?”

I said, “Sure.”

She started to cry.

“Why are you crying?” I asked.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “You’re the Speaker of the City Council.”

This conversation brought home to me the significance of my job to regular New Yorkers.

In a job like mine, getting things done is essential, even if it means compromising on an issue to move things forward. No one elected me to just say no. Deadlock is not a formula for government. In the past, I’d had a ringside seat when things would grind to a halt because the council and the mayor had frequently locked horns and wouldn’t compromise. I made a conscious decision to do it differently, to work with the mayor, because spitting at each other and wagging fingers isn’t governing. I saw Mayor Bloomberg as my colleague. If I was going to be an effective Speaker and we were going to move forward on an agenda that made things better for New Yorkers, I needed him, and he needed me.

That seems like an old-fashioned way of thinking, in these times where standoffs are the rule. And some people have criticized me for working so well with the mayor. But I never doubted that he and I could work together. We already had a track record of working together respectfully even when we didn’t agree. He and I worked
with
each other on the smoking ban, and we worked
against
each other when he was pushing a plan to build a football stadium on Manhattan’s West Side—in my district. The project was critically important for the mayor because of his aspirations to bring the Olympics to New York. But I thought it would be terrible for my district and a bad thing for the city overall. I did everything I could to get that project killed. But later he and I worked together on rezoning the proposed stadium site for new office and residential development. He certainly didn’t like that I had helped kill his stadium proposal, but we both knew that we would live to see another day—to agree or disagree, then move on to the next issue.

I believe that my drive to get as much done as possible goes back to my experience of my mother dying young. Because the idea “I’ll get another opportunity” just doesn’t exist in my way of looking at things. That might seem morbid, but it’s quite effective: every moment could be your last, so you have to try to make the most of it. So the idea that I would become Speaker and then squander it for the sake of press or politics or whatever, as opposed to just getting as much done as possible, is unimaginable to me because it’s completely counter to the reality that life is incredibly short.

Working with Mayor Bloomberg and his office was a pleasure after Rudy Giuliani, who had been mayor when I first came to the City Council and whose administration Tom Duane had fought with. Back then Tom and I had been trying to get somebody who lived in a housing project a new toilet, and the manager had said, “You’ll have to call the mayor’s office.” I was like, “Really?” And the manager said, “Yes, everything is going through City Hall.”

So I called City Hall, and they said, “That’s right, we’re taking all constituent issues.”

And I said, “You guys, that’s impossible! I mean, how are you possibly going to take all of this in?” Handling it all through City Hall was not only controlling but ineffective.

Once, when I was on the council during Mayor Giuliani’s term, I was meeting with a commissioner, and the commissioner’s secretary came in and said, “Deputy Mayor so-and-so is on the way.”

“Okay, I’ll wrap up,” I said.

“Wrap up? You’ll get out!” the commissioner said.

“What are you talking about?”

“We’re not allowed to meet with you,” he explained. “I didn’t get this meeting approved by City Hall.”

And so my chief of staff and I had to go out through the loading dock of that building. Literally, we climbed over boxes to get out, and this commissioner was frantic that a deputy mayor might see me.

Criticism of me as Speaker went into high gear in 2008, when Mayor Bloomberg proposed extending term limits so he could run for a third term. I had to decide whether to support his proposal. The choice wasn’t at all clear, and I struggled to balance what was best for him, for the city, for the City Council, and for me personally. (Extending term limits would affect me, too, because it would likely mean putting off plans to run for mayor and serving another four years on the City Council.) We were in a truly tough moment in the city. The bottom had just fallen out of the economy, and we were bracing for the worst recession since the Depression.

Deciding whether to support Mayor Bloomberg on term limits was further complicated by the fact that voters had twice approved limiting the city’s elected officials to two four-year terms. Going against the majority of voters on any issue is never easy. Before the mayor proposed the change, I’d made it clear that the voters had spoken and that I would not support a change in the law. I also had to consider what I’d said in the past about term limits, and whether I wanted to change my position. But now that Mayor Bloomberg had proposed just such a change, I felt compelled in my role as Speaker to consider the many, often contentious voices. And I felt compelled to hold my tongue and keep my thoughts to myself, as people on both sides of the issue made their views known in the press, via e-mail, on the street, and in the corridors of City Hall.

Before I made my decision, I met personally with dozens of councilmembers, who were not at all shy about telling me what they thought, one way or another. I spoke with union leaders and representatives from good-government groups, some of whom supported term limits and some of whom opposed them. My usual goal was to find common ground, but on this issue either you were for or against, because there was no middle ground. My decision to keep my thoughts to myself until the very end and focus on listening to the debate didn’t win me any friends in the press or with people on either side of the divide.

Before the City Council took a final vote, we had two days (and nearly twenty hours) of spirited public hearings to amend the city charter to override the term limits law. I decided to support the mayor and let the voters decide whether to give him a third term. And my constituents, many of whom were furious with me for supporting the mayor, got to decide too. The voters spoke. They reelected the mayor, and they elected me to a third term in the City Council. But neither of us won with huge majorities.

The whole experience with extending term limits was tough, but on reflection I have no regrets about my decision. I think that all too often politicians take a position and never leave themselves open to the possibility that circumstances may change, or that they may learn new information, or that the world may change, and that a position that at one point seemed cast in stone was worth reconsidering. I see no crime in that, and, in fact, I think it’s essential.

Nothing takes up more time on the City Council’s calendar than the budget. In January the mayor presents his preliminary budget. Then we review the budget and hold hearings—it’s a very involved process. The mayor then takes into consideration (or doesn’t) what comes out of the hearings and presents his executive budget in May. Between May and the end of June, it’s all budget all the time, but the real negotiations don’t start until June because you have to have a series of public hearings first. I’ve always thought it was rude to the public to be engaged in significant negotiations on the budget while the public hearings were still going on, because they’re coming to tell us what they think about the budget. And what the public thinks about the budget should in part inform our priorities.

A
s lead negotiator for the City Council, I’m in constant motion. My life is a steady litany of input and decisions. “This is where we’re at.” “Do you think we should push on this?” “Should we accept that?” “I need you to think about this.” “We’re nowhere!” “Go back and try again!” And on and on. My first year was brutal, and not just for me. In addition to specific issues, my staff and I had to deal with all the broader budget issues. Should we raise taxes? If so, what kind? Should we cut this? Does the Department of Transportation need more funding because it was a bad winter and the roads are a mess? Does the Department of Education need more money for this or that? Should we put more dollars into the police? Should we keep all the firehouses open? And what about the specific requests from councilmembers? And what about my own priorities. I lost my temper from time to time negotiating all these issues, but somehow we all got through it, and it got easier each year: not because the decisions were necessarily easier to make, but because I learned how to work with my staff so that they could work with the mayor’s staff and we could have more effective and less contentious negotiations. Still, by definition the budget process is not easy and it’s messy. And each year’s budget presents its own problems because of the specific issues the city faces, and this changes from year to year.

I was quickly reminded that no one in city government, including the Speaker, has absolute power. The mayor proposes the budget, and we negotiate and then adopt. Over the course of negotiating seven budgets, we struggled to keep tax increases to a minimum, and to limit layoffs, and the budget was always balanced. The heartbreak for me was that the financial collapse in 2008 forced us to make painful cuts, but none that I believed would put lives at risk. It’s extremely difficult when you don’t have enough money to do everything you’d like to do and you’re not able to fully fund the social services that you know are good and necessary. It’s excruciating to have to tell people, “You’re not going to get the amount of money you need to do the work you do.”

T
here have also been wonderful times. Housing is a passion of mine. In a city the size of New York, there are invariably going to be a handful of landlords who let their buildings fall apart. They’re interested in collecting rent and don’t care about anything else, and they just assume they’ll never get caught. So you wind up with buildings where tenants are living in appalling conditions.

The problem was—and had been for a long time—that the city didn’t have strong enough laws in place to force these owners to do what needed to be done.

Before I became Speaker, given my history as a housing organizer, fixing up dilapidated housing was one of my major priorities. So once I became Speaker and was in a position to do something, we drafted and passed the Safe Housing Law. It focuses on the landlords who owned the two hundred worst buildings—the ones that have the most violations. This wasn’t just a matter of peeling paint and broken faucets. I remember visiting one building in Brooklyn and it was disgusting. I almost vomited from the garbage and the maggots. The conditions were unsafe and inhuman.

To come up with an effective bill, my staff and I worked for a year with both tenant advocates and real estate folks, all in the room together. You couldn’t do it without the landlords, because they know how the buildings work. They’re not interested in protecting the slumlords, but they’re also not interested in letting all landlords get painted with a broad brush. We went about writing the bill with the recognition that not every building in the city of New York needs a big hammer, or that much attention, but that we should be targeting the worst buildings with greater attention.