The speaker’s secrets
Anew era of secrecy and subterfuge has descended on the City Council under Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito. She has failed to keep current an easily searchable database showing how Council members have divvied up slush funds totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.
At the same time, Mark-Viverito refuses to release paperwork showing how she bottled up a home-rule message calling on the state Legislature to sweeten disability pension benefits for newly hired police and firefighters.
By our reading of the Freedom of Information statute, Mark-Viverito is clearly violating the law regarding the public’s access to information — likely because releasing the information will show her dictatorial hand at work.
Let’s take the issues one at a time, starting with the slush.
The Council annually doles out hundreds of millions of dollars to favored non-profit groups in the form of “member items.”
After five members were busted for filching cash or funding phony groups, former Speaker Chris Quinn created a searchable database detailing who got money and from which member.
Now, several weeks after the new budget passed, the database still has last year’s numbers and names and, until we inquired, there was no information at all showing how the Council divided several hundred million dollars in capital funds.
As for the disappearance of the pension measure, Mark-Viverito faces the justified wrath of Uniformed Firefighters Association President Steve Cassidy.
While we oppose his plan as too costly, he’s right in saying Mark-Viverito snookered him.
Backed by a veto-proof 37 colleagues, Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley asked the Council’s legislative staff to draft a home rule message to be sent to Albany. She was told another member had already put in the same request and that, per tradition, the work would be done for this unnamed legislator.
Whoever it was never introduced the home rule measure in the Council, killing it. Rightly, Cassidy wants to know the identity of the assassin. Mark-Viverito refuses to release the name, preposterously claiming lawyer-client privilege. Follow her logic and almost nothing the Council does would be public.
Just how Mark-Viverito would like it.