The Wolf at the Door: Why I am Leaving Julie Menin Off My Ballot
As a former candidate for City Council District 5, I’ve grown to know the intimate details of this neighborhood, learning each day how much there is to learn. This is part of the reason why Julie Menin’s candidacy raises so many questions for me.
Why have neither of the two Democratic clubs with active organizing and outreach in the neighborhood endorsed her?
East River Democratic Club and Four Freedoms Democratic Club are the area’s two Democratic clubs with active organizing and engagement with the district. They perform outreach to include residents across the spectrum of income, age, and identity. They have always played a strong role in organizing for each successive and incumbent elected official. They don’t have all the influence, but a considerable voice.
They both roundly rejected Julie Menin in this race. The recently inaugurated NYPAN chapter in the district also spoke against her. Members note that they have never seen her at a meeting or attempting to get involved.
During the pandemic, these clubs and other local organizations, met virtually, performed essential outreach, mutual aid, and hygiene item handouts. She participated in none of these efforts that brought our neighborhood together during this challenging and traumatic time.
Rebecca Lamorte, Billy Freeland, Kim Moscaritolo, Tricia Shimamura, and Marco Tamayo have all participated in efforts to help our neighbors via either our Community Board or local Democratic clubs. They hit the streets and organized to hand out meals and reach out to local businesses. They used their connections to help our neighbors to survive, something Ms. Menin was not seen doing so.
Why didn’t she run downtown?
As chair of Community Board 1 downtown (City Council District 5 is located inside of Community Board 8), Julie Menin gained a solid grasp of issues impacting that area. It takes years of commitment and dedication to become chair of a Community Board, which she surely put into that effort.
That’s why it was so surprising to find her running in my home district, covering the UES, Roosevelt Island, and sliver of Spanish Harlem. I ran for city council in 2017, have been attending Community Board 8 meetings for years, and have gotten to know just about everyone in local politics here and hadn’t seen her once.
At the same time, so much of her literature is aimed at telling voters that she’s a “true” Upper East Sider. In my experience, things like that in campaign literature usually speak of a self-consciousness, a “let me make it clear” position when it’s otherwise quite unclear.
The bare facts, from an “inside baseball” position: the race downtown has some strong candidates who have been building power for a long time and have strong fundraising numbers. In our district, there are many younger first-time candidates who had to handle much of their fundraising one phone call at a time, without big donors backing them. Menin had that advantage and saw an opportunity.
Why does she insist that NYC 2020 Census was a success?
As mentioned above, every other candidate in this field was working on local organizing efforts during the pandemic. While Julie Menin was working on the census, our neighborhood census volunteers still couldn’t find a way to distribute materials or give them to doormen at neighborhood high-rises. They couldn’t knock doors, they couldn’t work with doormen, and management was unresponsive.
It’s long been known that doorman buildings are a hurdle to census efforts. In a year where we thought two congressional seats hung in the balance, why wasn’t there a new or renewed effort to engage with them? Why did we repeat the mistakes of the past, especially with supposedly local Julie Menin running the effort? Why did Julie Menin not use her connections to the real estate industry to engage management companies to expand the census?
She didn’t organize in our neighborhood and our Congressional District’s response rate was 6% lower than it was in 2010.* New York lost a congressional seat by 89 uncounted people. Julie Menin defensively took to Twitter (she rarely tweets) to call her efforts a success and call out those who would suggest her effort was anything less than perfect.
The numbers don’t lie.
Why does it feel like power brokers outside our neighborhood want her as our city council member, instead of their own?
Member deference is a powerful tool. It’s a literal quid pro quo. For example, if Councilman Jones needs a zoning change and there’s a vote on it, Councilwoman Smith will always vote in favor. Why? So that, when Councilwoman Smith needs her zoning change passed, Councilman Jones nods along, regardless of what district activists are saying. Smith may not even pay attention to the details of the change, since it’s not her district.
That’s what makes the effort by outside groups and conservative Democrats from outside our neighborhood so nefarious, yet transparent. They see Menin as developer friendly and business friendly, in a world where business interests consistently come at the cost of individual constituent interests. Additionally, Ms. Menin has surely built business relationships and political connections over the years. All of these people expect her success to complement their own.
Consider her resume. As Commissioner in the Office of Media and Entertainment, she wielded a lot of power. This city has seen a boon of major motion pictures, billion dollar Marvel movies for example, that shoot in New York City. Why would these movies consider spending significant budget dollars to shoot in busy, expensive, and difficult to control New York City, if there weren’t some major incentives given away in exchange. For perspective, ten years ago, Woody Allen claimed it was now too expensive to shoot movies in New York. Suddenly he’s making movies in New York again.
To give an even clearer picture, during each year when she was Commissioner, Saturday Night Live, an NYC institution since 1975, received $12–15 million in tax credits. I don’t see Lorne Michaels packing up one way or the other. When she says we should do anything to save local business, is this what she was talking about when the rest of us were thinking about dry cleaners closing shop?
My question: What will this cost us?
When we give away incentives and freebies to billion-dollar corporations using our city resources, what does it cost us? What does it cost us to have a city councilmember friendly to major developers, and married to one, as we see entire blocks wrapped in green construction plywood? What does it cost us to yield voices from inside our community in favor of those from outside?
This current field of candidates has enough people who have been working to build this neighborhood for almost 10 years to fill all five ranking choices. Everyone has participated on the community board or in great local organizations aimed at making this the best place to live in the city. A recent endorsement announced by AOC’s “Courage to Change” organization ranked Lamorte, Freeland, Sosa, Moscaritolo, and Shimamura, a tacit “do not rank” for Menin.
One wonders why so much of Julie Menin’s campaign literature is focused on telling voters she really is from here, she has roots here, she really lives here. Is it meant to anesthetize the fact that she’s not from here and has a goal that could extract the heart and soul of the neighborhood, our regional character, and develop us into a glass and steel oblivion?
While other candidates have invested time to build our neighborhood with no return other than their love of their neighbors, she has come for profit and power. Once gained, she will leave us living in perpetual shadow of empty towers, housing wealth for people who couldn’t be bothered to give a damn that a local shop, who spent 30 years building the community, was demolished so that an empty castle may stand, vapid, vacant, and disposable.
Patrick Bobilin is a founding member of UES4BLM, East River Democratic Club, UES Mutual Aid Network, and UES Progressives.
