Paul Newell says, with evident pride, “I have spent my professional life fighting to make Lower Manhattan a neighborhood where working people and middle class people can live and earn a living.” In this case, the emphasis in on the word “fighting.”
“Eight years ago, I ran for this office,” he recalls, “arguing that we lost more than we gained by having Sheldon Silver as our Assembly member. I recognize the real, concrete good Silver was able to do for Lower Manhattan, at Gateway Plaza, after September 11, 2001, and throughout the district. But Albany’s culture of corruption and failure hurts all of us. Now, there is no debate about transparency. And I’m the only candidate who has ever stood up to powerful interests. I’ve taken a stand against power structure in Albany.”
“Today,” he notes, “we have an unprecedented opportunity to change that culture. I believe I am the best-suited candidate to deliver on that opportunity.”
“Having three men in a room making laws for 20 million people is not a viable model,” he adds, in a reference to the custom of all important decisions in Albany being made by the Governor, and the leaders of the State Senate and Assembly. “For the first time in generations, we have a chance to change this. That’s why it is essential that we have an Assembly member from this district to push for this. If we have enough members pushing, this is going to happen.”
“This is not pie in the sky,” Mr. Newell says of the ethics reform that civic leaders have long called for, but Albany has yet to deliver. “Forty other states have this. But we are stuck in the model from the first half of the 20th century model in New York State. This can and must change.”
In the wake of such a change, he predicts a dam break of other reforms. “You would not, for example, have capricious State control of Battery Park City Authority, if we had a legislature that reflected the priorities of residents,” he says. “You would not have tenants in Gateway Plaza fighting every couple of years to protect affordability. And you would not have our district owed, under a federal consent decree, more than $45 million in education funding that we are still waiting for.”
Among his first priorities as an Assembly member will be, Mr. Newell, says, affordable housing, education, and health care. On the first of these fronts, he envisions, “extending rent regulation to apartments currently not covered and using co-op and condo tax abatements to make Lower Manhattan more affordable.”
For education, in addition to collecting funds the State owes the local school district, he wants, “a school catalyst law that says, if the City grants a certain number of certificates of occupancy with a given community, they have to stop until a new school is built. This is something I have been proposing for more than a decade.”
To preserve access to health care, he says, “I will work in the legislature to oppose any change in our community’s certificate of need.” (This is a legal document that must be approved before a hospital can close of scale back services, such as St. Vincent’s did in 2010, and Beth Israel now plans to do. “I fought to stop the St. Vincent’s closure, and we would have won based on the certificate,” he recalls. “But they were in federal bankruptcy court, which shut us down. In this case, Beth-Israel doesn’t have that card to play.”
He notes that, “it’s not that hospitals are not financially viable. They’re just not as lucrative as luxury condos. The allocation of space is the eternal question for cities. And it is essential that we as a state regulate this usage so that it serves the community.”
“My position is not that nothing should ever be built,” Mr. Newell says about the broader question of development. “My position is that developers need us more than we need them, and if we use regulatory authority to manage development, they are going to work with us.”
Of the reform push that is central to his agenda, Mr. Newell says, “it’s never going to be perfect, but we have an opportunity to make it better. I have been effective at working for this at local level and believe I can be effective at State legislative level.”