KRUGER IN VELMANETTE'S 'HOOD State Senator Carl Kruger couldn't resist when a member of Flatbush's Sephardic community who co-owns a coffee business informed him of a summons he'd received for odors escaping into the street. He immediately saw a story the media would love, with lots of opportunities for coffee puns and the apparent absurdity of the city levying fines against a coffee business that smelled like coffee. Kruger dashed off a pun-laden press release assailing the city's action and scheduled a press conference outside the business, Gillies Coffee Company, on 19th Street between 3rd and 4th avenues.

Wait a moment-19th Street and 3rd Avenue? That's three miles from Kruger's district. The business happens to be represented in the Senate by Velmanette Montgomery. "We have to be advocates of people all over New York City," Kruger told us. But Kruger announced his press conference without first inviting Montgomery, or even informing her, or even checking to see whose district he would be traipsing into that morning. (Another two blocks and it would have been in the district of Kruger's arch enemy, Marty Connor. Too bad!)

We called Montgomery to ask whether she felt Kruger ignored political protocol, not to mention common courtesy, but we didn't hear back by press time. We should mention that Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and Councilman Simcha Felder were at the press conference. Felder, by the way, was also out of his district. He was trespassing in Sara Gonzalez's territory. (One of the business owners apparently lives in Felder's district.)

Of course, bringing Montgomery into the picture might have jeopardized the publicity Kruger stood to receive. Indeed, the story-including a quote from Senator Kruger-found its way onto the front page of Metro in The New York Times on the day of the press conference. (If we had the stomach to watch the schmaltzy evening news, we'd probably have seen it there, too.) Kruger is hardly the only politician who finagles to get himself into the media coverage of a story he discovers and publicizes. In fact, they all do. Pols don't want to do the leg work and then not get credit for it. But rarely do they unilaterally organize events in their colleagues' districts. (There-we made it through the entire item without letting a single coffee pun filter through. Whoops!)

BITTER CONNOR RECLAIMS LOANS What besides bitterness could explain why Senator Marty Connor took back campaign contributions he'd transferred to the fund that helps Democratic candidates in other districts? Connor was obviously miffed that his colleagues ousted him as minority leader, so he reclaimed $320,000 he'd given the New York State Democratic Senate Campaign Committee over the years. A few weeks later he returned $150,000 so the committee-which is $927,000 in debt-could pay its bills through January.

Surely Connor didn't need $300,000 in his piggy bank, with his next campaign a good two years away (assuming he even runs). More likely he just didn't want to see money he'd raised benefiting senators who conspired to get rid of him. Though Connor's contributions were listed as transfers and not loans, apparently it was legal for him to reclaim them.

Too bad for Connor he can't reclaim three $4,900 donations he made in September to the campaign committees of senators who defected from his camp two months later: Carl Andrews, Ruth Hassell-Thompson, and Byron Brown.

FELDER TAKES EXCEPTION City Councilman Simcha Felder termed "unfair" our analogy in a recent column about his opposition to closing Prospect Park to cars during rush hour. We'd said the councilman would not make saving motorists time his priority if cars were using his Borough Park neighborhood as a shortcut on Saturday mornings. Felder pointed out that he lives at the Midwood end of his district, and that the analogy gave the impression that his focus is on the Orthodox community, when in fact "I've made it a mission of mine to make sure everyone in the 44th (District) is represented."

Besides, he said, the issue is not Saturday mornings but whether to keep the park open to cars during rush hours. However, our point was that if Felder represented joggers and bikers who use the park, he might take a different position. He said that was not necessarily the case. Felder noted that the park has been used for years to give drivers a faster route to Manhattan. "The park has become a highway during the evening and morning rush hours," he said.

That, of course, is exactly the problem that car-ban proponents are trying to solve. For putting his finger on the issue and for giving his unexpurgated opinion, misguided though it may be, Felder gets our Cheer of the Week. But we don't buy the argument that because the park has evolved as a traffic-release valve it should remain so. To make another analogy that Felder considers unfair: The fact that slavery has been used for much of humanity's existence doesn't make it right. Values evolve. It seems likely that decades from now, people will find it hard to believe Prospect Park was ever open to cars.

Postscript: Community Board 14 Chairman Alvin Berk, a cars-in-park booster like Felder, also thought we were off the mark to suggest Felder was merely defending the interests of Borough Park motorists. The councilman was also standing up for motorists in the rest of his district, Berk said. He certainly was. But Berk, like Felder, missed our point, which was that councilmembers must sometimes try to achieve the greater good rather than simply what's best for their own constituents. If the city proposed converting Fort Hamilton Parkway into a rush-hour-only highway to get Park Slope motorists to the Verrazano Bridge without having to take the Gowanus Expressway, all Brooklyn councilmembers would unite to save Felder's district. But in the case of Prospect Park, we're seeing provincialism, not unity.

CANDIDATE COMES UP EMPTY The 2001 City Council campaign of Yolanda Martin distinguished itself by getting fined by the Campaign Finance Board without ever receiving a cent from the program. Running against eventual winner Erik Martin Dilan and others in Cypress Hills and East New York, Yolanda Martin failed to make the Democratic primary ballot. She then managed to get on the general election ballot as an independent by collecting signatures as the candidate of a party she called Friends United, named after the Cypress Hills day care where she works. Of course, Martin had no chance to win on this line, but perhaps she just wanted to get on the ballot in order to collect the $1,900 in matching funds she'd requested from the Campaign Finance Program.

But she received nothing, probably because she only raised $4,167 from 37 contributors, while the program requires participants to raise at least $5,000 from 50 or more people. That alleviated our fears that Martin had collected public funds for a sham campaign (she even ignored Citizens Union's offer to include her in its voting guide free of charge and ultimately received 333 votes, just 4 percent of the total).

But then we noticed her campaign had spent $1,260, all of it going to Friends United to Elect Yolanda Martin. Her online Board of Elections filing doesn't say how (or if) that money was spent, or what became of the rest of the $4,167 she raised. We hope she saved some of it because she owes the Campaign Finance Board $500 in fines for filing four statements a total of 602 days late. We left a message for Martin at her day care center, but she didn't call back.

COURT KILLS CASH COW The state's high court has killed a cash cow for political officials who for years have been given lucrative legal work by friendly judges. The Court of Appeals banned state and county pols and their law firms from taking assignments to represent the poor and incapacitated beginning in 2003, the Daily News reported. Chief Judge Judith Kaye said such appointments should only be made on merit.

Will it make a difference? Perhaps not a great one, said Councilman Lew Fidler, a Democratic district leader and attorney who six years ago removed his name from the list of lawyers that judges use to hand out work. "I'm not saying I don't approve of this rule, but what you have to remember is it's always someone who knows somebody," Fidler said. "It's inevitable. You aren't likely to see a judge select someone he's never met…and he's not likely to pick someone he doesn't like."

Another Brooklyn district leader told us a judge, unsolicited, once offered him some work because he felt bad that the district leader never got in on the action. The district leader politely declined. Why are Brooklyn judges so likely to choose political types? Because the judges are themselves political types who owe their jobs largely to Democratic clubs and county Democratic leader Clarence Norman. The rule change promises to remove one lever from Norman's political machine, and could have a direct impact on Democratic district leaders like Steve Cohn, a Court Street attorney, who might have to ditch his unpaid political position to remain eligible for legal work handouts. Cohn, who lost a council race to David Yassky in 2001, didn't return our call or e-mails.

PASSKEY FOR YASSKY Does City Councilman David Yassky have a free pass to reelection next year? It didn't go unnoticed when Steve Cohn and Liz Daly, two of his opponents in last year's race, bought tickets to Yassky's December fundraiser. Daly, a Democratic district leader, dropped out early in the contest when she failed to get the endorsement of her own club, Independent Neighborhood Democrats, but Cohn stuck around for the Democratic primary and finished second. Some folks thought Cohn might take on Yassky again, but his fundraiser appearance indicates otherwise. "You usually don't contribute to your opponent," one observer said dryly.

One person who didn't attend Yassky's fundraiser was Ken Diamondstone of Boerum Hill, who finished third in the 2001 primary. Diamondstone recently tried to become chairman of Community Board 2, which would have given him a better platform from which to run for council, but he was crushed 32-4 by the incumbent, Shirley McRae. That doesn't exactly bode well for his chances to upend the councilman. "It's hard to believe Diamondstone has any credible shot at Yassky," one observer commented.

Yassky has been active and has avoided major controversies, though he did offend some of his Brooklyn Heights neighbors by not fighting a plan by his former employer, Brooklyn Law School, to build a dormitory tower. But it would take much more than that to kill his reelection.

DAGGER THROUGH BORO PARK As soon as the new City Council map was proposed, we heard whispers that Councilman Simcha Felder had a problem with it. But in the ensuing months, which included a public hearing on the plan, we didn't see any objections from Felder in print. It turns out Felder has apparently been working behind the scenes to have the map adjusted, rather than make a big show of it, as (for example) Carl Kruger did when his state Senate district was initially carved up last spring. "Until the process is over, it's not over," the councilman told us. "I think that the goal has to be to connect areas that have the same needs." Translation: Sunset Park shouldn't be in the same district as Borough Park and Bensonhurst.

But when we asked if his objection was to the dagger-shaped corridor that plunges into his district from the Sunset Park-based 38th C.D., Felder said, "I'm not talking about it." Fair enough. We will. Given that the 38th's new representative, Sara Gonzalez, also doesn't like the proposed lines, it seems likely they'll be changed. But the challenge to the districting commission will be to give the 38th enough minority voters to meet federal guidelines as a so-called voting rights district.

As weird as the corridor looks, it does give the 38th enough Asian voters to meet those federal guidelines. Gonzalez's objection is that Latinos would no longer be a majority in the 38th. That's a political consideration more than a legal one, of course, but the districting commission will be sympathetic nonetheless. Insiders expect the district to be brought up to 50 percent Latino in the second draft of the proposal, scheduled for release December 18.

The rest of Brooklyn won't likely look much different from the first draft, in part because Councilman Charles Barron has apparently abandoned his short-lived effort to move more of Canarsie from Lew Fidler's district into his. Barron's surrender was a bow to political reality-he doesn't have enough influence with council Speaker Gifford Miller to win a battle with Fidler, chairman of Brooklyn's council delegation-and perhaps a realization that adding more Canarsie would increase his district's percentage of white voters, whom he doesn't seem particularly comfortable representing.

Barron has confided to others his far-fetched fear that if several black candidates ran against him, they could split the black vote and allow a single white candidate to win. Thus he'd prefer to keep his district as black as possible. Gee, d'ya think 87 percent black is enough for Barron to feel safe?

OLD-SCHOOL DEMOCRAT PASSES AWAY When Rep. Anthony Weiner was first elected to the City Council in 1991, Lew Fidler (now a Councilman) suggested he hire Estelle Hyatt, an ally of the man Weiner had defeated, then-district leader Mike Garson (now a judge). Weiner was dubious. No one had worked harder against his election than Hyatt, a longtime "regular" Democrat who'd been unemployed for a few months. Besides, she was already over 70 years old, and a holdover from the days when patronage-driven clubhouse politics reigned in Brooklyn. "As kind of a peace offering, and a classic contract hire, I hired Estelle," said Weiner, who was elected to Congress in 1998, "and now I can't even imagine how I would have been able to do this without her."

Hyatt worked full-time on Weiner's staff from his first day as an elected official until about two months ago, when declining health compelled her to retire. She died less than two weeks later. "It's a real melancholy passing," the congressman said. "She was such an important political institution." In the 1960s, before there were female district leaders, Hyatt was president of the women's club of the Flatbush Democratic Club, which later merged with the Independent Democrats of Flatbush, the club of former Assembly Speaker Mel Miller.

Hyatt ran for district leader in 1970, losing to Liz Holtzman in a "regular-versus-reformer" battle, setting the stage for Holtzman's shocking upset of 49-year Rep. Manny Celler, 84, two years later. From 1975 through 1982, Hyatt did constituent work for Councilman Leon Katz. It was in solving problems for regular folks that Hyatt found her calling. She did it the old-fashioned way, in person and by phone. "There was no computer on her desk-we couldn't force her to," Weiner laughed. "She would frequently complain that she didn't get a raise, and I would say I didn't get an e-mail."

Weiner said his office received many a heartfelt thank-you note from people Hyatt had helped. "There was no one who inspired the kind of loyalty and love that she did," Weiner said. "They just don't make them like Estelle Hyatt anymore."

Borough Politics Archive

2002
December 16 column.
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September 30 column.
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September 16 column.
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2001
December 10 column.
December 3 column.
November 19 column.
November 12 column.
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October 22 column.
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April 9 column.
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March 26 column.
March 19 column.
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2000
December 25 column.
December 18 column.
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December 4 column.
November 27 column.
November 20 column.
November 13 column.
November 6 column.
October 30 column.
October 23 column.
October 16 column.
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October 2 column.
September 25 column.
September 18 column.
September 11 column.
September 4 column.
August 28 column.
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1999
December 16 column.
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