SusanCampriello: My Works

As seen in The Spirit (West Side) and Our Town (East Side) Aug. 14, 2008.

The candidates:
Manhattan Surrogate’s Court is where estates and contested wills are settled and adoption decisions are made.

The court’s two judges are each elected to serve 14-year terms, but they must resign at the end of the calendar year in which they turn 70, as Judge Renee Roth will in December.

With no Republican running, the winner of a three-way Democratic primary, on Sept. 9, will join Judge Kristin Booth Glenn, who was elected in 2005, on the bench.

Nora Anderson was a clerk in Surrogate’s Clerk for many years. John Reddy, Jr., is counsel to the Public Administrator and Judge Milton Tingling has served as a judge in criminal, civil and supreme courts.

Though all three candidates have been endorsed by organizations and individuals across Manhattan Island, the county Democratic committee is backing Tingling.

Nora Anderson:

Nora Anderson wants to replace her boss.

A former clerk in the Surrogate’s Court, Anderson worked under Judge Eve Preminger and later under Judge Renee Roth, who will retire by year’s end.

Anderson has never sought office before and said she has cut back her hours at the Brooklyn firm Seth Rubinstein, P. C. to devote time to campaigning. Although she still accepts and tries cases, the campaign takes up most of her time and energy. After spending all day with voters and supporters, she returns to her Upper West Side apartment only to sleep.

Anderson studied biology at Hampton University and worked briefly in a laboratory researching cures for tropical diseases before deciding to pursue a law degree instead. She attended Brooklyn Law College at night while working full time in the office of General Counsel at the New York City Department of parks and Recreation.

Anderson argues that her experience in Surrogate’s Court makes her the strongest candidate. She knows the law, the court and how the appeals process works, she explained, so she can write the strongest decisions.

As a former clerk in the court, Anderson said that educating clerks in all aspects of the law and probate proceedings will help the court run more smoothly. Rotating clerks around the various departments will also expose them to all aspects of Surrogate’s Court, eliminating the need to hire new personnel. This will streamline work, too: file clerks sometimes direct lawyers to complete or edit forms in different ways, causing delays in paper processing and, ultimately, all proceedings. Anderson also wants clerks who help litigants without representation to help attorneys who are unfamiliar with the laws surrounding the execution of wills and settling of estates. And finally, as a lawyer, Anderson said she has a better understanding of litigators’ busy schedules and overhead costs. Some judges are not sympathetic to the needs of lawyers, she said.

Her overall goal, though, is to help more New Yorkers avoid actually going to Surrogate’s Court to settle estates. Trying a case in any court, she said, usually takes more time and money for litigants than if the parties involved can settle the issue themselves. The stakes are also higher.

“When you come to court,” she said, “You’re putting you life in the hands of a judge or a jury.”

As seen in The Spirit (West Side) and Our Town (East Side) Aug. 14, 2008.

Surrogate’s race draws big political guns–but 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 Street 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 forming 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—one of a small pool of passers by who seemed to know about the Surrogate’s Court—stopped for a brief chat, expressing frustration at what he perceives as corruption on the court. Reddy, who is running on a platform of ideas to change the way the court was run, tried to make his case to the man. He 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. As a consultant, Reddy has hired The Parkside Group, which has helped several members of the city council and state legislature as well as current Surrogate, Kristin Booth Glenn, win elections. Chung Seto, and Kevin Wardally of Bill Lynch Associates, who have worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaigns, among others, are overseeing Tingling’s fundraising and campaigning. Tingling also counts former Mayor David Dinkins and Rep. Charles Rangel among his most public supporters. Nora Anderson has Michael Oliva, a long-time grassroots organizer and political strategist, managing her campaign, while Lisa Hernandez Gioia of The Esler Group, which has consulted for Gov. David Paterson among other candidates, doing her fundraising.

Tingling, who has been a Supreme Court justice in Manhattan for seven years, has also been out meeting voters. Recently, Council Member Inez Dickens stood next to Tingling along 135th Street, announcing his presence to the people tricking 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 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, if elected.

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 profile so that the first experience the average New Yorker has there 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 also hopes to open the court by making it more friendly and welcoming to those unfamiliar with Surrogate’s practices. A probate law instructor, Reddy believes that as more lawyers become familiar with the court, the court will become less of a mystery to litigants. Reddy said his 13 years as counsel to the public administrator, which handles estates for people who die without a will and wills with vague language or instructions, has prepared him for the bench, he argues.

Anderson, who was a clerk in the court for nearly five years 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 clerks. This, she argues, would allow clerks to master all areas of the court and be better able to assist litigants. Rotating existing staff would eliminate the need to hire, and pay, more clerks, she said. Anderson also said she hopes to encourage would-be litigants to settle out of court, since all court proceedings can become expensive, time-consuming and stressful.

Anderson has cut back her hours with the Brooklyn law firm Seth Rubenstein, P.C. in order to spend time campaigning at greenmarkets, street fairs and on sidewalks. On one recent evening, she hopped, teetered and pirouetted in heels along Eighth Avenue between 22nd and 23rd streets, dodging and following 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.”

But there wasn’t much time for Anderson to talk about campaign specifics. If she wasn’t explaining how to register as a Democrat, she was shouting out summaries of what the court does and what she would do as judge, if elected.

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

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 The Capitol.

June O’Neill, St. Lawrence County Democratic Committee chair, was named co-chair of the Democratic State Party in 2006, and became the sole chair in April, after Dave Pollack’s resignation.
Looking forward to the fall elections, she took some time to reflect on strategies for November, pushing her 62-county effort and her work as chair to increase enrollment, funding, visibility and candidate recruitment.
“The only way to eat an elephant,” she said, “is one bite at a time.”
What follows is an edited transcript.

The Capitol: Did the State Committee’s 62-county party idea come out of Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy?
June O’Neill: It partly came out of that, and it partly came out of the fact that I am from an upstate, rural area and know that we have to be strong everywhere in order to keep winning elections. I think it’s the unique role of the party to be concerned with races all the way up and down the ballot.

TC: St. Lawrence County is so much different from Erie County, from the Bronx. With Democrats hoping to gain the majority in the State Senate by winning seats in so many corners of the state, how will the party remain unified?
JO: We’re really one state. In another life, I was part of Mario Cuomo’s cabinet, and I was director of the Office of Rural Affairs. It was the first cabinet-level office of its kind in the country, and I know that it’s not that the problems are different necessarily between urban and rural areas. It’s that the solutions need to be different.

TC: Do you think those differences might lead to party infighting over legislation?
JO: I don’t know that it’s necessarily infighting on the legislation. The problem is that in a state as large and diverse as New York, one size does not fit all. The trick is that making sure that when we look at legislation, that we’re concerned about the fact that it’s going to have the intended effect everywhere. So, for example, in my county, whenever a law or regulation is passed that says, “in order to do this, you must go over there,” whether it’s the motor vehicle bureau or for unemployment insurance, it immediately becomes a problem for large areas of the state where there isn’t public transit. There are different challenges in different parts of the state, and I think, frankly, that as Democrats we do a better job of being mindful of those challenges.

TC: Are there any elections in New York that you think are particularly interesting, that perhaps others have not been paying as much attention to?
JO: At the Congressional level, we have the Tom Reynolds and the Jim Walsh seats that are open, and in both of those cases, the Democratic candidates ran two years ago and came within a whisker of defeating the then-incumbent, and did it without a lot of help from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the State Committee or, frankly, anybody else. Those have now become top-tier races. And now we have the Fossella seat, which is of course in play, and the DCCC has already moved that in the Red-to-Blue column.

TC: Sen. Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic nomination. Has the absence of a New Yorker in the White House made Washington ignore or more slowly respond to New York’s needs or issues?
JO: Hillary is still our junior senator, and of course we have Chuck Schumer as our senior senator. It’s very hard to ignore one, never mind both, of them when they are strongly advocating on our behalf. And they’ve done a terrific job in spite of the fact that we’ve had a deaf ear in the White House in the past eight years.

TC: Are there any issues with a specific impact on New York State that you think should be addressed by Congress or the next president?
JO: Well, I think they absolutely have to do something about energy. And I think the issue that Pat Moynihan brought to the floor, the fact that historically New York State has paid more in federal taxes than we’ve received back in aid.

TC: Who do you see as some of the up-and-coming leaders within the party?
JO: We have people from all over the state. For example, Long Island, which used to be solidly Republican, we’ve got the legislatures, we’ve got both county executives. This past November, we picked up a lot in Dutchess County—I believe we have the legislature there for the first time in 40 years. We elected a district attorney right in Rensselaer County, which is Joe Bruno’s home county, over his hand-picked candidate. In Monroe County, we’re now within one seat of taking the legislature.

TC: There has been a lot of debate about preserving the Electoral College. You were an elector in 2004 and will be again this year. Has the experience of being on the inside of that process changed your views of it?
JO: It really didn’t. It was very exciting. I think we established that I was the first person from St. Lawrence County to ever have been a member of the Electoral College. It was really an honor, coming from such a rural part of the state, and I understand that I’m only the second person from a rural county to ever chair the state party. … It’s just that in recent years because of the disputed results of the presidential elections the role has been highlighted. The same is with the superdelegate role.

TC: Your former co-chair, David Pollack, resigned from that position in early April. How did your duties, or the duties of the state chair, change?
JO: The duties have changed to the extent of event coverage. Dave graciously volunteered to be our new voter outreach coordinator. And he’s still a very good Democrat. We’re still working together on voter outreach, because that’s critical. This is going to be a tight presidential race nationwide. We obviously have to do our part. We’re also in a strong position to help other states by sending volunteers, perhaps into Pennsylvania, to do some voter registration. We’ve had lots of people in New York volunteer to do phone calls into other states. They did it in the primary, and they’ll do it in the general election, as well. New York has a critical role to play, and we need to make sure that our base, our new Democrats and the people who are just sick and tired of the mess that the Bush administration has gotten us into are going to get out to the polls and translate to help all of those down-ballot races which are so critical.

TC: Are there any differences in the way the office is being run now, with only one person at the top as opposed to two?
JO: Well, Dave’s title was co-chair, but according to the party rules, we were not co-chairs. So, in terms of administration and so forth, no, there isn’t any administrative change. It’s mostly a function of being able to be in two places at one time, and so forth. Dave is still, as I said, a volunteer helping us with new voter outreach and actively involved with the blogs and helping to get our Facebook up—I’m on Facebook.

TC: Are you a Facebook addict?
JO: I was an addict the minute that I signed up for it. There’s so much going on right now between the elections and the convention—they’re totally consuming us. I get my Facebook messages on my Blackberry.

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.

The honeymoon isn’t over for Gov. David A. Paterson.

Despite delivering bad news this morning to a room of business leaders, educators and legislators about the economy including staggering unemployment, fewer homes being sold, and the failure of programs organized to employ people, the governor’s speech was punctuated by lengthy outbursts of applause.

Before the speech, former Mayor Ed Koch said that the crowd—roughly 740 people all seated at tables in the midtown Hilton grand ballroom—was the largest turnout for an Association for a Better New York breakfast he could remember.

“He has a great opportunity to be heard because these are all the movers and the shakers in the city,” he said.

Paterson drew laughs and humbled himself in front of the audience, before he briefly addressed his entry into the governorship and discussed the state budget.

Paterson announced that he thought the budget would be approved later today, a budget he called too big and too bloated. He said that the budget growth should have been conservative, rather that one that “ballooned out of a lot of our revenue forecasts and our expenditures.”

“Even if we were wrong, we would have then returned a-billion-and-a-half dollars to a sagging economy,” he said, adding, “even if we had misestimated we would have addressed our problems down the road.”

He said that signs were in the air of the recession the country has entered well before the budget was drafted.

He said that by the third week of March, when he became governor, the state had received $461 million less in taxes from the 20 largest payers than it had by the same time last year. As a result, he cut the budget, lowering its growth from 4.8 percent to 4.4 percent over last year’s budget.

However the savings of that cut will be used up this month if the economy continues in the same direction.

“Though our budget is sound now, it will be dependent on whether or not people get the message that we so vitally need to understand, which is that our economy is reeling,” he said.

Paterson addressed the lack of employment opportunities in the city. He drew parallels between the present economic situation and that of the state in the early nineteenth century, when shipping along the Erie Canal brought economic growth to New York City despite the deficit of the budget.

“People moved where the jobs were. Now the people are moving away,” he said.

The government, he said, needs to spend its money more wisely and asked the audience to be a part of the solution.

Paterson said he hoped that projects like the Second Avenue subway line and the development of Stewart Airport, near Newburgh, N.Y., Hudson Yards and Moynihan Station on Manhattan’s west side will foster economic growth and offer new employment opportunities downstate.

After the speech concluded and as the plates of eggs and potatoes and dishes were being cleared away, Jeffrey Horn, a representative from 100 Black Men of America, Inc., a group dedicated educating and empowering youth, said that he would like to see the amount of money being put towards those projects going towards health care and education for more people.

But, he said, anything that brought jobs to the city was a worthwhile investment and was hopeful that the governor could bring action.

“I think he’ll make the smart cuts,” he said.

John Banks, vice president of government relations for Consolidated Edison, Inc., said that the governor’s reluctance to solve the state’s economic problems through taxation of citizens is refreshing.

Shira Phelps, of consulting firm Harris Rand Lusk, said she was impressed by Paterson’s numerous historical references and timelines of major construction projects in the 1930s and quotations of men such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Robert F. Kennedy.

In his speech, Paterson acknowledged the long hard road before him but is confident the government and business leaders can prevail.

“If we try hard enough, we may be able to look back in just a few years and be very proud of the work we’ve done,” he said.

In the days after Hurricane Katrina swept through the gulf coast and levees failed to keep the storm surge from flooding New Orleans, some members of the media said they were shocked by the poverty they found in the city. They vowed not to let poverty coverage fade from view. But some journalists say that’s exactly what happened. And today, a panel of news editors, opinion writers and reporters put poverty coverage, itself, under the microscope.

The panel, sponsored by the Welfare Reform Network, scrutinized the problems with current coverage including reader apathy and limited access to impoverished people and made suggestions on ways to bring more attention to issues surrounding poverty.

Many newspapers do not even have poverty beat reporters.

All too frequently, stock market or the housing market will headline a page and poverty will be left off it, Neil deMause, opinion writer for Metro New York, a free paper distributed on street corners and at subway entrances, said.

“Economic coverage is Wall Street coverage,” he said.

DeMause said that few media outlets dedicate themselves to long-term coverage of systemic poverty. Editors see the issue as a “downer” that does not interest the reading public, he said. “It’s not sexy.”

Instead of following economic issues of poor New Yorkers, panelists agreed that newspapers tend to cover poverty and poor New Yorkers around the holidays or will write an investigative series and then abandon the issue until the next season or policy change is in view.

The faults of coverage do not only lay with the reporters and editors, panelist Fred Scaglione, press editor of NY Non-Profit Press, told the audience of students, members of not-for-profit organizations and other journalists.

He urged them to write letters to editors, demanding that their papers publish more, and better, poverty stories.

“In my experience, editors respond to the demands of their readers,” he said.

But the best entry route into a story was contested.

Panelist Errol Louis, columnist for the NY Daily News, said that readers tend to lose sympathy for the subject of a profile or featured in an anecdote if that person made a bad decision that precipitated his or her current situation. He said that exposing flawed characters in print turn readers of his paper callous towards subjects. “Some readers think undeserving poor should not be helped,” he said.

But, he said, if a story is told that could happen to anybody—a car accident, for example, that renders a healthy adult disabled—and readers will be much more sympathetic, because they may be the next victim of an unfortunate turn of events.

Audience member Karen Wright addressed the panel and audience with a story of frustration. She was interviewed for an article about illegal boarding houses earlier this year. She felt that an element of the greater story was lost when her story was not told in full.

Wright also attacked panelist Jarret Murphy’s self-proclaimed love for using statistics in his stories. “I’m sick of being a statistic,” she said. Her words were met with applause.

Murphy, an editor of City Limits, noted that some organizations that work with poor New Yorkers direct staff not to speak to reporters. Instead, staff organize an interview with a client who has been spoon fed “talking points” to regurgitate to the reporter.

But audience member Barbara Delsman of The Hope Project, an organization that helps homeless and poor people find employment, explained that clients sometimes need to take caution when speaking with press. She does not coach clients, and was unable to say which organizations do.

“We don’t want them to fall victim,” she said. Instead, staff explains to clients that they should request anonymity if they are willing to divulge such information.

Delsman spoke about one example of a past client who told reporters personal information about his life regarding criminal activity and drug use, who later regretted his decision.

Louis noted that even though the number of New Yorkers living in public housing developments roughly equals the population of Atlanta, Ga., no public housing beat exists on his paper.

Jocelyn Wiener, a reporter with the Sacramento Bee and an ethics fellow with the Poynter Institute, who did not participate in the panel, said that many papers lack beats that cover poverty. One possible reason for this, she said, is that a poverty beat does not deliver a lot of breaking news.

At many papers, poverty, she said, is “not considered a fundamental element, like City Hall.”

When asked what issues of homelessness or poverty were being overlooked by the press, staff at Picture the Homeless, an organization of homeless people who work to prevent their compatriots from becoming mere statistics, answered, “how ’bout all of them?”

Councilman Leroy Comrie spoke in City Hall today as a father, describing the “stomach-turning feeling of failing” to procure tickets for his children’s favorite Disney concerts and live shows.

Tomorrow, Comrie said, he will introduce legislation to the City Council that might make the stomach-turning a thing of the past.

The bill, nicknamed the “Hannah Montana Bill” after the Disney television show whose live concert received national attention over the scramble for—and prices of—its tickets, will mandate that 40 percent of tickets for shows in any venue receiving public funding will be set aside for sale to individual customers.

(In December 2007, $26 tickets to the Hannah Montana show were sold for over $250.)

“It is my hope that this bill will operate as ‘market-correction’ legislation,” Comrie (D-Queens) said.

His research found that, for example, tickets for the upcoming Van Halen concert cost between $15 and $154, while the same tickets are being offered on StubHub, just one of many online ticket merchants, for $6,975.

Tickets to sporting events at Yankee Stadium, Shea Stadium and Madison Square Garden are subject to markup, as well as The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and the live stage production of “Go, Diego, Go,” a children’s television show.

“This bill ensures that the free market principles behind ticket resale will still take place, however, it levels the playing field for working class New Yorkers whose tax subsidize the arenas where these concerts are taking place,” he said.

Research also revealed that internet ticket vendors use technology that enables them to snap up highly anticipated tickets in an instant, leaving very few tickets left for individual purchasers. Technology has also been used to also get around purchase limits already imposed by Ticketmaster.

Comrie hoped that ticket brokers would soon equip themselves with security software that allows a computer to distinguish between human users and automated devices, although this is not outlined in the bill.

The bill also limits individuals to purchasing only four tickets from a particular vender per day. However, it does not mandate which seats would be held. Doing this would encroach on the way that venues do business, he said.

The Hannah Montana Bill is modeled on Missouri legislation, which requires people who purchased tickets over the internet to show identification and a credit card when they retrieved their tickets.

Comrie did not discount the idea of using an online affidavit to ensure that each individual was, in fact, an individual.

“What happens now is that [vendors] have no idea who these tickets are going to,” he said.

In June 2007, Governor Spitzer signed a measure that ended a price cap on resold tickets. The legislation was supposed to protect season tickets holders from being penalized by major sports teams who claimed they had exclusive rights to resell their organization’s tickets.

Comrie said that the high prices seen now are an “unintended negative consequence to that legislation.” What began as a slow rise in ticket costs, he said, has become a crescendo.

Legislation similar to the Hannah Montana Bill in front of the State Assembly would prohibit service charges in sales of tickets and exclusive contracts between ticket agents and publicly owned or supported venues.

Assemblyman Richard Brodsky (D-Westchester) proposed that bill in January 2007, but has yet to find a sponsor in the State Senate. Brodsky opposed the bill Spitzer signed last summer. Staff said that the Hannah Montana Bill, upon first hear, sounded like it would work well for the city, where most of the State’s large venues are located.

“It is imperative for the City Council to address this issue,” Comrie said.