Ex-Councilman would increase community policing, support parents
Democratic mayoral candidate Sal Albanese is not one to toe the party line as a means of winning an election.
First elected to the City Council to represent Bay Ridge in 1982, Albanese is looking to use his record as an independently-minded populist to appeal to the city’s voters in next November’s mayoral election, arguing the other Democratic candidates are more eager to take care of their campaign donors than listen to voters. Albanese ran for mayor in 1997 and 2001, and served on the Council’s education, transportation and public safety committees.
“Some people asked me why I don’t run for Public Advocate instead. I’m not office shopping,” insisted the 63-year-old Brooklynite at a recent interview near his Bay Ridge headquarters. “You’re in this arena to make the city a better place.”
Albanese has worked in the financial sector since leaving the Council in 1998, and is now managing director of institutional sales & marketing for a financial services firm.
“I took a lot of heat” is a common refrain the candidate uses, pointing out he will make hard decisions despite political consequences. To illustrate the point, he recalls a vote he cast for a gay rights bill in 1986 while representing a conservative constituency. Angry residents picketed his South Brooklyn home, forcing him to stay holed up inside for days.
But he adds his primary battles have been waged with his colleagues in City Hall, not with his neighbors.
“I know them all,” he said of his opponents. “They’re up to here in special interests.”
The issues facing Mott Haven and Hunts Point are similar to those that trouble residents in low-income neighborhoods across the city, he said, adding that the current mayor and the big-name candidates looking to succeed him are not inclined to stick their necks out for the city’s less privileged.
“This mayor thinks the minimum wage is a communist plot,” he said, arguing that Mayor Bloomberg disrespected teachers in a labor dispute by “refusing to sit down and negotiate,” and showed disdain for school bus drivers who struck for better wages and conditions.
“As mayor he should be in the room saying ‘nobody leaves the room until it’s resolved,’ but he’s too busy going to Bermuda or London,” he said.
The candidate says the minimum wage should be raised, but that elected officials are a “chattering political class” that “spends more time at cocktail parties” than trying to understand the struggles of their constituents.
Following an April 20 forum in lower Manhattan, at which the mayoral candidates expressed their views on affordable housing, a Mott Haven tenant leader came away impressed by Albanese.
“I feel that as a mayor he’d do a good job because he’s the only one [of the candidates] who doesn’t owe big corporations nothing,” said Princella Jameson, president of the tenant’s association at Millbrook Houses. “He would get a lot done. It’s just that nobody knows him.”
Based on his time on the City Council’s public safety committee, Albanese concludes more officers should be hired to man community policing patrols that could help mend strained relations between NYPD and residents while tackling quality of life concerns such as noise complaints, speeding vehicles and “low level” drug deals. Stop and Frisk is “a good policy that stops people from carrying guns,” he said, but added precincts practice the method in a “helter skelter” way that alienates residents.
As a former high school and junior high school teacher whose public service career began on a Brooklyn school board, Albanese’s eyes light up when the topic shifts to education. He sees poverty as the root cause underlying learning problems in low-income neighborhoods, and disdains the administration’s policy of closing, then reopening, schools.
“All these kids can learn, it’s not an IQ issue. It’s a stress issue. Parents are overwhelmed,” he said, adding he would open pediatric support centers for parents, and that “Mott Haven and Hunts Point would be a great place to put them.”
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