With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir (13 page)

T
hree years into my time at AVP, a state senate seat opened up, and Tom Duane started talking about running for it. So naturally I started thinking about running for his seat on the City Council. I felt a little guilty, because I hadn’t been at AVP for long, and becoming an elected official had not always been a huge goal of mine. But I was definitely interested. I knew that Tom’s support would be exceedingly helpful. I went back and forth, but the more I thought about it, the more appealing it became. I could play a role in the deliberations of the City Council. As Tom’s chief of staff, I had learned the nuts and bolts of advocating for our neighborhood, but as an elected member of the City Council, I could take the lead in a way that I couldn’t as chief of staff.

Soon after I made my decision, I announced that I’d be running in the February 1999 special election to fill Tom’s seat. (Tom ran for the open state senate seat basically unopposed and easily won.) Not unexpectedly, several other people decided to run for Tom’s council seat as well. Christopher Lynn had been commissioner for both the Department of Transportation and the Taxi and Limousine Commission under Giuliani; Aubrey Lees was a Democratic district leader in Greenwich Village. Both were openly gay. Carlos Manzano, a Democratic state committeeman and president of the McManus Democratic Club, wasn’t specific about his sexual orientation. And we also had a write-in candidate who was the only openly heterosexual candidate in the race.

On the issues, all of us basically had the same positions, so I ran on my experience as a housing organizer, community activist, and Tom’s chief of staff. I got endorsements from most of the key elected officials and community leaders in the district. And I inherited some of Tom’s state senate race campaign staff, which had just elected him. We wound up winning by a significant margin.

How could I experience this amazing event in my life without thinking of my mother? She had been with me for only sixteen years, but in some ways she is with me every day. She had a devout, spiritual belief that people have an obligation to help one another. She believed that—along with raising her children—her life’s work was helping people in need. She believed, in some almost divine sense, that we are not allowed to leave people behind. Maybe because she knew that she wasn’t going to live as long as she wanted, she was determined to use her time as aggressively as she could, to make as big an impact as she could. Her sense of urgency has become a big part of my personality.

My mother also made it abundantly clear to my sister and me, and this was in the 1960s and 1970s, that we could be whatever we wanted to be, and that we were to be the best at whatever we chose to be. She imbued in us a strong belief about the power of girls and women. As I’ve said, on her dresser she had a little altar with statues and relics and medals of women, and Elizabeth Ann Seton was her favorite saint. She believed devoutly in the power of women to bring miraculous interventions. Today Ellen and I can’t do miracles, but we have done what we wanted, and we have done it well.

I decided I wanted my swearing-in ceremony for City Council to be women-focused and fun and edgy, maybe a little edgier than my mother would have expected. My friend Victoria Cruz was the emcee. Vickie had been a client at AVP, and she’s transgender. She was in the welfare-to-work program and was assigned to work in a nursing home, which she loved. She would have been very good at her job. When some of the other nurses realized she was transgender, she became a target. She bravely reported that a group of nurses had groped her and used anti-gay slurs against her. Her case was serious. A criminal court eventually found two of the nurses guilty of harassment. She spent so much time in our office that she basically became the receptionist, so we eventually hired her as the receptionist. Today she is a caseworker at AVP. As I said, she was the emcee of my swearing-in ceremony. Marie Wilson from the Ms. Foundation was the keynote speaker, and Eve Ensler performed a scene from
The
Vagina Monologues
as free entertainment. The daughter of friends held the book I used to take the oath of office. My poor father was onstage as Eve started the
Vagina Monologues
excerpt. It was a bit more graphic than I’d expected. When she was done, my dad looked at me and said, “You couldn’t just have had the Pledge of Allegiance?”

I can’t remember if I spoke about my mom that day, but she was there in spirit. She would have loved it. She would have had her hair done and worn a great outfit and her good jewelry. Seeing me sworn in to the City Council would have pleased her, because now I was in a position to help make life better for the people in my district and for all New Yorkers. I think my mother would have been happy that both of her daughters chose careers they enjoy.

The City Council is the legislative branch, and the mayor is the executive branch of New York City’s government. As the legislative body, we have power over all the city’s administrative laws and codes. The mayor proposes the budget, but we have to negotiate it together and come to agreement and vote on it. All the big decisions around zoning, and what gets built, and how things get built are the result of negotiations between the mayor and the council.

After I had a couple of years on the council, I set my sights on becoming chair of its health committee, which has jurisdiction over a range of issues that affect people in the most fundamental ways. The Speaker of the City Council, who was then Gifford Miller, decides on committee chairs. I’d lobbied Gifford to become chair of the health committee and was appointed in January 2002.

While Gifford was running for Speaker I’d supported him, and I traveled around the city helping him win support. This work helped me in creating the health committee agenda. For example, we spent a decent amount of time on Staten Island, which helped me focus on the fact that while Staten Island has some big private hospitals, it is the only borough without a public hospital. In a lot of ways its residents are underserved in public health, particularly those who are not insured. Early on in my chairpersonship, there was a proposal to close one of the island’s private hospitals. We tried to save the hospital but couldn’t. The next question was then how to deal with the health-care needs of the residents of the island’s North Shore. We built a coalition and worked with lots of folks and were able to open a federally qualified health center to fill part of the gap. When I was chair, we studied the length of wait times for screening mammograms across the city and released a report that compared wait times for private and public hospitals. Staten Island has a particularly high rate of breast cancer but no public hospital. So Minority Leader Jimmy Oddo and I had the city buy a mammogram van that focuses exclusively on Staten Island, because uninsured people have nowhere on the island to go. Health care is such a significant issue out there.

As chair of the health committee I had to deal with a lot of controversial and important issues, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposal to ban smoking in all restaurants and bars. Bloomberg is fiercely antismoking and saw this as an issue of workplace safety: he thought people who worked in restaurants and bars should be free from tobacco smoke just as office workers already were. In 1995 New York City passed a law that outlawed smoking in restaurants with more than thirty-five seats, although not in the bar areas of all restaurants and not in stand-alone bars. As a result of the new law, thirteen thousand restaurants and bars across the city banned smoking.

Lots of people greeted the mayor’s proposal as radical. In New York State, restaurants were required to set aside 70 percent of their seating area for nonsmokers, but the smoking area could be in the same room, which if you think about it is ridiculous if you’re trying to protect nonsmokers from secondhand smoke.

I tried to do everything I could to ensure the bill’s passage—I was its lead sponsor. Not surprisingly, it was a pretty high-pitched battle, because many restaurant and bar owners thought a smoking ban was going to be bad for business. They were worried about their financial future.

Despite how heated the process got, it didn’t intimidate me, even though at times it could feel endless, especially after hours-long public hearings where everyone had an opportunity to speak their mind. It’s hard to predict what will matter to people, but when something does, you have to give them the chance to be heard. So we had tons of meetings with every constituent group, and we listened to their perspectives on what a total ban on smoking in their bars would mean for them and for their livelihoods. At the end of the process, which appropriately took months, most of the opponents were still opposed to it, but no one complained about the process, and many even thanked the council for it, because it had given them an opportunity to make their voices heard.

I learned an important lesson from this experience: how you do things matters. There’s a difference between giving people an opportunity to be heard and giving people what they want. People want what they want, but they also respect being listened to. This is something I always try to be mindful of, although sometimes I get in a rush and forget. I know it matters in terms of how people feel about our work in the City Council and throughout city government. Even if they do not agree with what we’ve done, at least they have been shown respect. In any case, the smoking ban proved to be a success. It caused no decrease in revenues at restaurants or bars. None of the understandable fears came to pass, and given New York City’s prominence, I like to think that our ban had a ripple effect.

As health chair, I intervened to prevent a strike by thousands of home health aides, by pushing their employer and their union to meet and come to an agreement. In the end neither side got exactly what it wanted, but the deal was good enough for everyone to walk away from the negotiating table feeling like they’d gotten
something
. I have a soft spot in my heart for home health aides. They work so hard caring for our family members, like my mother, and I will always be grateful to the women who were so kind to my mother in her last months.

I’m not sure where or how, but sometime during those early years, I found a way to negotiate so that more often than not we ended up with a deal, not a standoff. I just don’t stop or take no for an answer, and I try as hard as I can to keep everyone at the negotiating table. I believe there is almost always a moment in the deliberations when the different sides will intersect, creating a moment of commonality. If you’re watching and listening carefully, people will unknowingly offer you that moment. They’ll say something more honest than what they’ve been saying for hours before. It will show what they really want and need, as opposed to what they have been saying they want and need. You have to wait for that moment, and then seize on it, and then anything is possible.

I came to understand that the personal is never wholly separate from the political. We are most moved by the issues that touch our lives and our hearts. When I joined the council, I didn’t know that my heart was about to be moved in the most amazing way.

C
HAPTER
10

Kim

B
y the time I was elected to the City Council, my relationship with Laura was over. We are still friends, and I’m very grateful to her for helping me take the biggest step in my personal life. But now I was living alone again, and I went back to telling myself that not everyone gets everything in life. I gave up on the possibility of having another significant relationship and accepted that it wasn’t in the cards for me. As confident as I was in my ability to help solve my constituents’ problems, I had no confidence that I’d ever find a real partner in life. Then in the summer of 2001 my friend Emily Giske got inspired to play matchmaker when she spotted me, looking sad and lonely, in a nail salon in Greenwich Village.

I had gone for a manicure to try to cheer myself up after the death of my dear friend Ruth Kahn. Ruth was a sharp-tongued, chain-smoking neighborhood activist who was like a second mom to me. In fact, she was everybody’s bossy Jewish mother, butting into your life and telling you what to wear, what to do, what to support, and what to oppose. She was short, really small, but you never thought of her that way, because she was always pointing and wagging her finger in your face.

When I was working on Tom Duane’s campaign, Ruth was one of a core group of political people who were always organizing something or fighting someone or mad about this or that. Every day she would come around the campaign office to help, and you’d get the Ruth Kahn download. She expressed her opinions in a forceful and entertaining way, as in “A fence around a park gives new f——ing meaning to open space.” She hated fences around parks.

After Tom was elected to the City Council, Ruth took me shopping, because on campaigns you wear jeans and T-shirts, and she didn’t want me showing up at City Hall as his chief of staff “dressed like a slob.” For a retired social worker in her seventies, she had quite the “out there” fashion sense; she wore leather pants because they were warm, or so she said—I think she wore them because she could. And for some reason, I didn’t mind her telling me what to wear. Ruth was a complete character, totally opinionated and loyal and loving in an obnoxious and pushy way—a great friend and a real constant in my life. And then suddenly in 2001 she was gone. A massive heart attack.

Her death was devastating to me. I had no appetite and lost weight without trying. I must have looked pretty bad when Emily saw me at the salon. It was probably a good thing she didn’t have anyone to introduce me to that day, because I think I’d have said no. But a short time later Emily and her girlfriend were in Provincetown, where they wound up spending time with Kim Catullo, whom they had met the previous March and liked a lot. At some point Emily decided to be a matchmaker.

Kim had only recently moved to the city from New Jersey, where she grew up and worked as an attorney. Like me, Kim had lost her mother when she was a teenager. So Emily made a pitch to Kim about what we had in common. When she mentioned that I was a politician, though, that was it. Kim wasn’t interested in going out with an elected official. She’s a private person, and being with someone in the public eye was precisely what she
wasn’t
interested in. She actually loves politics and studied political science at Rutgers University, but she is a private person.