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City Council member Margaret Chin is concerned that her office telephone number may have been hijacked by a phone bank seeking to mobilize support for a controversial zoning measure currently under consideration. At Tuesday night’s meeting of Community Board 1 (CB1), Paul Leonard, Ms. Chin’s communications director, said, “we got a heads up from a member of the board about calls that were supposedly coming from our office soliciting support for the Water Street text amendment.”
“Those calls, we’ve been told, were shown as coming from our District Office number,” Mr. Leonard continued. “I want to make it very clear to you tonight that our office would never make those kind of calls on that issue or any other issue. We’re looking into the matter. We believe there might be a third party who was contracted to reach out to garner support for the measure, maybe using a tactic that might be misleading for some people.”
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Paul Leonard, communications director for Ms. Chin: “I want to make it very clear to you tonight that our office would never make those kind of calls. We believe there might be a third party who was contracted to reach out to garner support for the measure, maybe using a tactic that might be misleading for some people.” |
The Water Street text amendment is a proposal to convert to commercial, retail use more than 100,000 square feet of public space in arcades along Water Street. It is controversial because the storefronts created by this move would be enormously valuable, but the building owners who reap this benefit would pay nothing for the additional space. Instead, these developers would be required to upgrade the open plazas in front of their towers, and invest in resiliency measures that would harden the skyscrapers against flooding. (Both the arcades and the plazas were created when the buildings were constructed, in exchange for allowing the structures to rise higher, with more floor space, than otherwise would have been legally permitted.) Supporters of the Water Street proposal view this as a pragmatic and equitable quid pro quo. Critics decry it as a giveaway of public space for private profit.
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| CB1 Landmarks Committee chair Roger Byrom: “This is pretty inappropriate behavior, I think, for Council member Chin’s office to be taken over and soliciting members of the public.” |
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Roger Byrom, chair of CB1’s Landmark’s Committee, asked Mr. Leonard, “when you discover the party that has been doing this, would you be kind enough to share that with us? This is pretty inappropriate behavior, I think, for Council member Chin’s office to be taken over and soliciting members of the public.”
“I believe that it’s a group called Global Strategy that we found out was contracted to do this,” answered Mr. Leonard. “We are looking into it. We’ve gotten assurances that it will not happen again.” Global Strategy Group is a public relations and polling research firm that specializes in public affairs, issues management, and advocacy services. Among its clients are Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo. In this instance, the firm was working for the Downtown Alliance, which is one of the sponsors of the Water Street text amendment, according to representatives for both Global Strategy and the Alliance. These representatives also say that Global Strategy hired a subcontractor to handle the actual calls.
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| Under the proposal, more than 100,000 square feet of public space in the arcades more than a dozen buildings on Water Street would be turned into retail, with a total value that may exceed $100 million. |
“I was the person who reported this,” said Paul Hovitz, chair of CB1’s Youth and Education Committee. “It said ‘Margaret Chin’ on my television; it said ‘Margaret Chin’ on my phone, and the phone number was Margaret’s district office. I know, because I called that number afterward, and it picked up in Margaret’s office.”
“My concern, and the reason this seems to have credence,” Mr. Hovitz continued, “is because the person, after giving me this whole pitch about the Water Street text amendment and asking me if I was in favor, said to me, ‘do you want to be put through to the office to register your support? I told them that I had actually testified against it, and that I’d like to be put through to register my opposition, and I was disconnected.”
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| Paul Hovitz, co-chair of CB1’s Youth and Education Committee: The Called ID, “said ‘Margaret Chin’ on my television; it said ‘Margaret Chin’ on my phone, and the phone number was Margaret’s district office. I know, because I called that number afterward, and it picked up in Margaret’s office.” |
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“We think that it might be ID ‘spoofing,'” explained Mr. Leonard. This was a reference to the use of computer software in conjunction with telephone equipment to falsify the information transmitted to a Caller ID display, in order to disguise the caller’s identity. “It is something that is, unfortunately, not uncommon,” Mr Leonard said.
Under the federal Truth in Calling Act, spoofing is generally illegal, and carries fines of up to $10,000 per violation. The law specifically prohibits spoofing with intent to defraud, cause harm, or wrongly obtain anything of value. In this case, public support (or the appearance of such support) that might help persuade elected officials such as Ms. Chin to vote in favor of a measure such as the Water Street text amendment, which is currently before the City Council, could arguably constitute such a value, particularly because the retail space that will be created by enclosing the pedestrian arcades may be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and could generate tens of millions of dollars in rental income per year.
Andrew Breslau, a spokesman for the Downtown Alliance, which hired Global Strategies, said, “we are still trying to get to the bottom of it. In order to organize support for Water Street text amendment, we undertook a variety of strategies, calling and emailing residents. As part of that effort, we hired Global Strategy to organize a very limited phone bank. The authorized script that was used says very clearly that the caller is speaking on behalf of the Downtown Alliance. It is a succinct description of why the rezoning is a good thing for Lower Manhattan and asks the recipient if they agree and whether they would mind holding on while we connect them with Margaret Chin’s office. This was a very limited effort, by design. It was intended to facilitate, at most, two or three dozen contacts between constituents and Ms. Chin. The purpose was to keep up the momentum.”
The Alliance provided the Broadsheet with a copy of the phone bank script, the first line of which directs to caller to say, “Hello, is NAME HERE there? This is NAME HERE calling on behalf of the Alliance for Downtown New York.”
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| Margaret Chin |
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The script continues, “right now there is a proposal before the City Council that would allow property owners on Water Street to turn the often underutilized covered walkways — called arcades — into new neighborhood shops and restaurants. In exchange, building owners would be required to improve the concrete public plazas in front of their buildings with seating and green plants, improving our neighborhood’s open spaces.” The caller is then directed to add, “our neighborhood deserves a more inviting Water Street, but this proposal will only move forward if our Council member, Margaret Chin, votes in favor of it. It’s very important that she hears from you so she knows that the community supports this plan.”
The conclusion of the script directs the caller to tell the respondent, “I can connect you to Council member Chin’s office right now so you can urge her to vote for the Water Street rezoning proposal. Would you like me to connect you?” The last words the respondent would hear are, “Okay, great! Here’s what will happen. I’ll put you on hold for a moment, dial the number for the Council member’s office and then connect you. All you need to do is leave a message with your name, where you live, and that you support the Water Street Rezoning proposal.”
Glen Caplin, a spokesman for Global Strategy, says the firm “adheres to the highest standards of transparency and ethics. The script that was used by the phone banking service we contracted with clearly noted in the first sentence who the client was. These were routine advocacy calls to ask supporters of the rezoning to voice their support to their elected official. At no time, did anyone attempt to hide who the phone banking was on behalf of. We dispute the accuracy of these facts about the work of our subcontractor.”
Mr. Caplin additionally maintained that, “phone calls are monitored for quality purposes throughout the campaign and we have been assured by our subcontractor that not one caller deviated from the script that clearly states Downtown Alliance as the client in the opening line.”
Both Mr. Breslau and Mr. Caplin also questioned whether a caller putatively affiliated with Ms. Chin’s office would plausibly be expected to offer to connect the respondent to another extension within the same office.
Mr. Breslau continued, “until we understand what might have gone wrong here, we’re not going to use outside parties to marshal support. We’re committed to the merits of the proposal and will encourage people in the community who agree with us to express their opinion. But we’re not going to do anything that we don’t have 100 percent control over.” He added that the Water Street arcade proposal, “will be, as it ought to be, discussed and debated on its own merits.”
Mr. Leonard, speaking on behalf of Ms. Chin, told the Broadsheet, “upon being informed of the issue, Downtown Alliance responded quickly and assured us that it would not happen again. We remain concerned about misleading tactics employed by third-party polling firms, and are continuing to pursue avenues of relief regarding any illegal activity, such as ID spoofing.”
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