SusanCampriello: My Works

As seen in City Hall.

Former congressman boosts Taiwanese democracy and travels to Middle East with Jimmy Carter

While in Congress, Stephen Solarz spoke out against the totalitarian government in Taiwan and supported opposition movements and outspoken critics.

Nearly two decades have passed since redistricting ended his Congressional career, but Taiwan remains a prime concern of his at Solarz Associates, the consulting firm in Washington, D.C., that he runs. He said he is currently helping Taiwan forge relationships in Washington—though the specifics of what kind of assistance, he would not reveal. He did, however, claim an active role in helping transform a dictatorship there into a democracy.

During his time in elected office representing Brooklyn in the Assembly for six years and in the House for 18, Solarz faced criticism while in Congress for being too focused on world affairs. But years later, he uses the relationships he formed to help American companies in business ventures overseas to lead a firm which develops investment and contract negotiation strategies for American companies seeking projects abroad. His client roster includes people from Kyrgyzstan, northern Iraq, Papua New Guinea, South Korea, Philippines, Australia and India, he said.

Also, as a founding board member of the International Crisis Group, a non-governmental organization involved in conflict resolution around the world, in April he accompanied former President Jimmy Carter to the Middle East to meet with the kings of Saudi Arabia and Jordan, the presidents of Egypt, Syria and Israel, as well as other leaders.

“I thought this would be a good opportunity to meet with some of the key leaders in the region in order to get a better sense of the prospects for peace,” he said.

He came away from the trip feeling that an agreement between Israel and Syria was a very real possibility, he said, and that optimism was strengthened when, just days after the trip ended, Israel and Syria commenced negotiations mediated by Turkey.

Solarz lives outside Washington, but spends 12 weeks every year with his wife, Nina, in their villa in Turkey overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. But if not for all the business he has to conduct in Washington, he insisted, he would move back to New York.

“I like the excitement in New York, the cultural life,” he said.

He said he has warm memories of serving the constituents he represented in the Assembly and from his Congressional district, which was redrawn shortly before Nydia Velázquez (D-Brooklyn/Manhattan/Queens) defeated him in the 1992 primary.

Solarz said friends in New York keep him up to date on city politics. But though he has been following the emerging race to succeed Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Ind.) and is familiar with the expected major Democratic candidates, “nobody’s asked me for an endorsement,” he said.

The discussion of next year’s race brought up memories for him of what he misses most about the city’s political scene: winning elections.

“That was always nice,” he said.

As seen in City Hall.

Race this year draws big political guns, but still not much interest from voters

In New York, sometimes standing out in a crowd can be difficult.

On the corner of Broadway and West 96th streets one humid evening, John Reddy, Jr., a candidate for New York County Surrogate’s Court, competed for attention with a pair of people promoting a paint sale and a scattering of MTA employees advising commuters that a station entrance was closed.

In his khakis, blue shirt and red striped tie, Reddy might have blended in with the passing New Yorkers. But he was standing still, and two staffers formed a wall of campaign signs behind him.

“Hi, Manhattan Democrat?” he chirped, roughly 30 times a minute, while shaking hand with and passing campaign flyers to anyone who stopped.

One man stopped for a brief chat, expressing frustration at what he perceives as corruption on the Surrogate’s Court. Reddy is running on a platform of ideas to change the way the court was run. He tried to make his case to the man, but did not appear to succeed.
“There’s nothing you can do about it, John,” he said.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Reddy called after him.

Reddy is not the only candidate talking change in the race to succeed Judge Renee Roth, who is aging off the court at 70 this year. The Surrogate’s Court settles matters concerning adoptions, guardians, estates and wills of the deceased, but once again this year, the debate about its future is a lively one.

And like the Upper West Side corner, the race is crowded, with Judge Milton Tingling and Nora Anderson also vying for the Democratic nomination in the Sept. 9 primary.

Surrogate laws and practices are idiosyncratic. The three candidates agree that the general public is unfamiliar with the court, and that lawyers who practice in court are not always well informed either. The candidates also hope to speed up litigation time.

The primary race has already drawn more attention than normal due to the number of big names in local politics it has drawn. John Reddy has hired The Parkside Group as his consultant. Chung Seto, and Kevin Wardally of Bill Lynch Associates are overseeing Tingling’s fundraising and campaigning. Former Mayor David Dinkins (D) and Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Manhattan) are among Tingling’s most public supporters. Nora Anderson has Michael Oliva managing her campaign and Lisa Hernandez Gioia of The Esler Group doing her fundraising.

The morning after Reddy argued with the man about corruption on the court, Tingling, who has been a Manhattan Supreme Court justice for seven years, met voters along 135th Street. Council Member Inez Dickens (D-Manhattan) stood next to Tingling, announcing his presence to the people trickling into the subway station.

“Good morning, good morning! This is Judge Tingling, he’s running for Surrogate’s Court. Please support him, he’s from my community,” she shouted, nearly drowning out buses and trucks on Lenox Avenue. Behind her, staff from a consulting firm handed flyers to commuters.

Tingling greeted people more intimately, turning every handshake into an elongated arm grasp.

One woman stopped, looking confused. The candidate approached asking slowly, “No habla Inglés?” When she shook her head, Tingling turned his flyer over, revealing his qualifications written in Spanish.

Translators, Tingling said, are just part of the two-pronged approach to making the court more accessible to Manhattan’s diverse population. Translators could not only assist those involved with cases in the court, but can help teach people about wills and estates. Such meetings could take place in the satellite court offices Tingling said he hopes to open as part of this plan.

Most people know little about the Surrogate’s Court beyond being familiar with celebrity cases, like those of Woody Allen, Brooke Astor and J. Seward Johnson, or when they land in the court themselves. Tingling hopes to enhance the court’s presence in the public consciousness so that the first experience the average New Yorker has with the court is not as a litigant.

“There are cases going on there, there are people being affected all the time, but nobody knows,” he said. “It’s basically a secret court.”
Reddy hopes to open the court by making it more friendly and welcoming to those unfamiliar with Surrogate’s practices.

As more lawyers become familiar with the court, the court will become less of a mystery to litigants, he said.

Reddy said his 13 years as counsel to the public administrator of New York County has prepared him for the bench. Fewer than three years after being hired, Reddy had closed over 2,000 cases full of vague language or instructions that had been open for at least four years, he said. He is hopeful that he will be able to close Surrogate cases, some of which have been open even longer.

Anderson, who was a clerk in the court under former Surrogate Eve Preminger for nearly five years and has litigated in the court, has a different idea for speeding up the court process.

If elected, she would rotate pro se clerks around the court so that they would learn to master all areas of the court and better assist litigants who may be unfamiliar with the court’s proceedings.

Rotating existing staff would eliminate the need to hire, and pay, more clerks, she said. Moving clerks around departments would force clerks to become familiar with all aspects of the court, making them generally more familiar with practices than they currently are.

Plus, she said she would use her position as judge to educate people in an effort to keep them from having to come to court in the first place, since all court proceedings can become expensive, time consuming and stressful for litigants.

She has cut back her hours with the Brooklyn law firm Seth Rubenstein, P.C. in order to spend time campaigning at green markets, street fairs and on sidewalks, such as the one along Eighth Avenue between 22nd and 23rd streets where, one recent evening, she hopped, teetered and pirouetted in heels, dodging and followed potential voters. Wearing a tailored black suit over a sleeveless knit zebra-print top, she tried to stop pedestrian traffic.

“Hi, I’m running for Surrogate Court, and I need your support,” she said. “Hi, I’m running to be a judge. I’ve got a great website.”

She spent a lot of the time telling people how to register as Democrats so they could vote. She spent just as much time giving shouted-out summaries of what the court does and what she would do as judge if they voted for her.

“A large part of this campaign,” she said, “has been education.”

As seen in City Hall.

Prime NY celebrates 20 years of polls, numbers and term limits

Stuart Osnow says that he and Jerry Skurnik are the oldest living couple in New York politics. But though they have been business partners for 20 years and friends for even longer, the two had to be coaxed into staying near each other for long enough to pose for a photograph together.

“We’re never in the same room together,” Osnow explained.

Many of those they work with call Osnow and Skurnik “No Overlap,” Osnow explains, because the two naturally gravitate toward, and manage, different aspects of the company.

But in their office suite in the Woolworth Building, their voices do overlap, and frequently.

“There’s nothing that he does,” Osnow began describing their roles.

“Very little,” Skurnik interjected.

“That I do,” Osnow finished.

The secret to the success of their lengthy professional relationship, they say, is their complimentary personalities and skill sets.

Prime New York, their two-man data service company, provides political and grassroots campaigns with lists matching constituents’ ethnicities to voting histories. These lists can be used to profile the ideological leanings of neighborhoods and organizations.

Skurnik and Osnow met on then-Mayor Ed Koch’s 1982 gubernatorial campaign.

By the mid-1980s, they each had separate consulting businesses sharing a small office space in Time Square. They talked about merging their respective operations with John Sabini, who instead became the Queens County Democratic Chair following Donald Manes’ suicide, launching a career in government.

Originally thinking of being general political consultants, Skurnik and Osnow were given the idea of making the company a list business by Scott Stringer over dinner in Chinatown after a campaign event for one of Osnow’s clients.

With only one other list business around for competition at the time, Osnow and Skurnik quickly found clients and, as their almost-partner Sabini now says, they have become the list service name brand.

“They can deliver the [data] sort you want right away,” he said.

Until recently, most Prime New York’s work for campaigns involved printing labels and mailing cards. Campaigns often ordered many different lists for many different mailings over time. Today, campaigns get everything at once.
Beyond election season, Prime New York also matches voting lists to membership lists for organizations, from grassroots campaigns to labor unions looking to see how their members feel about issues.

Stringer, who still speaks with pride about his role in the firm’s origins, said Skurnik and Osnow have done well with the idea he inspired.

“They deal with everybody-Republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservatives,” Stringer said, pointing out that sometimes opposing candidates order similar lists from the firm, “and yet everybody has a great fondness for them.”

For years, Prime New York printed mailing labels or cards or printouts of constituent voting lists for clients. Most of this data, generated by partner company Voter Contact Service, headquartered in Hawaii, can now be downloaded from the internet or e-mailed to a client as a file.

At first, Osnow worked with the computers and used to make all their orders because he knew computer lingo, Osnow said, but not before Skurnik, leaning back in his chair, cut him off.

“I’m a political guy, not a computer guy,” he said.

Once done by fax or expensive dial-up modem calls to Hawaii, now orders are placed through an automated system online. With these well within Skurnik’s technological abilities, Osnow has been freed to help troubleshoot client problems. He also concentrates on sales, mailings and e-mail blasts.

Skurnik specializes in helping clients understand the voter lists they have purchased. Among his specialties is helping pare down mailings by analyzing voter lists to determine likely voters.

Their interests diverge outside the office as well. Osnow, a clarinet and saxophone player, is on the board of the Brooklyn-Queens Conservatory of Music. Skurnik, meanwhile, is partial to trips to Las Vegas casinos.

They have connected through Osnow’s eight-year-old twins, going to Mets games together and making an annual trip to a conference in Hawaii.

And looking at their own business, they agree that there is clear room for improvement: the method of using last names to determine a voter’s ethnicity must be refined, they both say, to avoid confusion between Caribbean and African-American last names or Soviet and Eastern European ones. Different ethnic groups tend to have different voting patterns.

But there is little opportunity for such time-intensive projects, with all the new lists to generate and match. They expect 2009 to be a busy year, with the volume of candidates expected. That candidates with smaller constituencies tend to use more lists will boost business as well.

“If we had a 20th anniversary shirt made,” Osnow said, “it would say, ‘Term limits are good for business, but bad for government.’”

As seen on City Hall.

Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg Wednesday

Mayor Michael Bloomberg delivered the keynote address to the Green Business Summit, a June 18 meeting of counselors for financial traders, lenders and power utilities to discuss the business opportunities and risks brought by new green regulations and technologies underway. The summit was sponsored and run by Chadbourne & Parke, the law firm now home to former Gov. George Pataki (R) and his chief of staff, John Cahill.

Pataki began the summit with a morning address calling green energy economically exciting because of its relation to the transportation sector.

“The transformation is going to be enormous. And because of that, the opportunities are enormous,” Pataki said.

Pataki predicted that a national law capping greenhouse gas emissions and putting in place a trading system would be passed in the near future, and said that this would be a huge improvement over the current hodgepodge of regional agreements throughout the country.

However, Reid Dechton, the executive director for energy and climate of the United Nations Foundation, who spoke as part of the summit’s energy trading panel, was skeptical that the next president would have an easy time creating a national policy.

In his keynote address, Bloomberg stressed what he called a natural link between capitalist mentality and environmentalist mentality.

“For far too long, environmentalists have gotten pitted against economic development,” he said. “I think that is a myth, and I also think that is a myth which is rapidly fading away as the reality of what happens when you do and don’t improve the environment starts coming home to roost.”

Bloomberg said that reducing global warming depends on people realizing the cost of carbon emissions.

“Green business is the future of business,” Bloomberg said.

He predicted that the next president will work toward passing legislation either installing a cap and trade system for carbon emissions or assigning a monetary value to carbon emissions.

This, he said, would spur similar action in other countries.

“The bottom line is that if we did it, then other people around the world might have the courage to do it,” he said. “I don’t think people here understand in this country how important America’s leadership is.”

Either solution would increase the cost of carbon emissions and carbon-based fuel, making alternative energy sources more cost-competitive and more attractive to consumers and industries.

Bloomberg highlighted several initiatives his administration launched, including requiring hybrid taxis, promoting solar energy generation, installing green roofs and promoting compact fluorescent bulb use.

Bloomberg then called on those in the audience to help make the next mayor continues these efforts.

“It’s your job to make sure our successors follow on,” he said.

As seen in City Hall.

Is City Hall next for Carlo Scissura?

Managing a staff of 80, meeting with constituent groups, and, most of all, making sure that everyone in Brooklyn and New York City knows what Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz is doing with and for his borough—that is what Carlo Scissura does as Markowitz’s chief of staff.

“It’s like four or five jobs,” he said, his brown eyes opened wide.

Originally hired as general counsel in January, Scissura was named Markowitz’s chief of staff in April.

One of the highlights so far has been a memorable trip to PS 205 in New Utrecht, where he was named principal for the day.

“I was great,” he said. “I gave them no homework for the weekend.”

A framed poem expressing the value of teachers, which he thinks everyone should remember, sits on his desk.

“The world may be different because I was important in the life of a CHILD,” it reads.

His time at PS 205 was not Scissura’s first exposure to city schools. He was elected to his district’s school board in 1999, and in 2004, Markowitz appointed him to the district’s Community Education Council. Through this and his service on Community Board 11, he was involved with numerous school construction projects and worked with several developers and city agencies.

He also taught law for four years at Baruch College.

And in a way, he still feels like a principal at his current job, though instead of keeping students in line and happy, he has an 80-member staff. Coming onto the job with the goal of improving daily operations at Borough Hall, one of the first things he did was give everyone on staff a copy of a management book called First, Break All the Rules.

“We have to break every rule that we know and go full speed ahead,” he recalled telling them.

An advisory board of staff members was created to report on ideas to further improve procedures. He shuffled personnel and implemented relaxing yoga breaks on Fridays.

He also re-arranged his office, positioning his desk diagonally in a far corner, facing the door.

“I like it that way,” he said. “It fits with my whole open-door policy.”

But though he has enjoyed the past two months on the job, he said an unfortunate consequence of his busy schedule is a drastic reduction in the time he has to spend in his kitchen.

“I make a great sauce, Penne Puttanesca,” he said, before launching into a slightly risque discussion of the derivation of the dish’s name.

He also laid claim to a great pesto, with a secret recipe he refused to reveal.

And there are the difficulties on the job as well, mostly from dealing with the controversial development projects and proposals—including the Atlantic Yards—which Markowitz supports.

Scissura thinks Atlantic Yards will benefit the surrounding community and the borough through the use of its stadium for local graduation ceremonies and performances of local bands.

“In 10 years, people are going to say, ‘Thank God that there were people out there that could get this done,’” Scissura predicted.

The future of the Brooklyn Academy of Music Cultural District in Ft. Greene, which he said rivals Manhattan’s Lincoln Center, is another project which he said would help make Brooklyn the future of the city.

And the Brooklyn borough president may be the future of city politics, he said. Markowitz has been weighing a run for mayor, but made no official announcement. According to Scissura, though, a possible campaign is on the radar screen.
“What’s good for Brooklyn translates into what’s good for New York City,” he said.

So when asked where he might go after term limits end Markowitz’s time in Borough Hall at the end of next year, Scissura is not sure.
One possibility, though, has crossed his mind.

“Maybe City Hall,” he said.