Credit for Koppell

BY N. CLARK JUDD

City Councilman Oliver Koppell had called for a number of the measures the City Council adopted on Dec. 18, which should raise $650 million for the city while making fewer cuts than Mayor Michael Bloomberg had called for, the councilman said in a press release.

The council voted to rescind the 7-percent reduction in property tax, but keep the $400 tax rebate checks, and temporarily raise the hotel tax. The extra cash flow will fund restorations to CUNY and community colleges. It will also allow the hiring of 250 new police officers each in January and July, stave off cuts at the Administration for Children’s Services and preserve the elder abuse prevention program — three things, Mr. Koppell said in a Christmas Eve press release, that he had recommended to the council speaker, Christine Quinn, in a late November memo.

“I’m pleased that many of my recommendations for protecting the city’s core services were incorporated into the council’s revenue enhancement package,” Mr. Koppell said in the press release.

“I’m not saying that I was the only one to think of it, but I was very pleased that the outline I presented to the speaker was followed,” he added Monday.

Yet there were other measures he had called for — including cutting city public-service advertising like anti-smoking ads and restoring the funds for adult day care programs was another — that weren’t implemented, he noted.

Mr. Koppell was, for many years, under the shadow of a long-ago falling out with Mr. Bloomberg that Bronx political observers say prevented him from exerting much power in the council. But Mr. Koppell was not without powerful friends. He had aligned himself with former Bronx Democratic Party boss Assemblyman Jose Rivera, whose son is the council majority leader.

Mr. Koppell has not had a pleasant winter in the media, taking flak for his vote to extend term limits and the lingering fallout from an internal Bronx Democratic Party tussle in which he sided with Mr. Rivera’s losing faction. Most of the Riverdale political elite was on the other side, with Assemblyman Carl Heastie, who is now the party leader.

He is all but certain to make use of the termlimits extension he voted for and seek a third term in 2009 — but the acrimony stirred up by the borough-wide power struggle earlier this year has made it difficult.

He’s moving forward with a campaign and is raising money, but wants to get more in the kitty before making an official announcement. He held a fund raiser recently and has another planned for March.

This is part of the January 1, 2009 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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