Councilman Liu wants to woo Riverdale

By N. Clark Judd

Pension funds, audits, procurement through government contracts — none of it bores John Liu. The city councilman and comptroller hopeful says he’s been spending his days lately telling people about how glamorous, or at least important, the city’s chief fiscal officer’s job really is.

“Part of the campaign is not only raising awareness of the candidate but also of the office,” said Mr. Liu, a naturalized citizen from Taiwan who now represents Flushing in the City Council, in an interview at The Riverdale Press offices. “So I’ve tried to do that as much as I can.”

In politically active Riverdale, the city comptroller’s race will likely be the closest one for citywide office on the Sept. 15 Democratic primary ballot. Mr. Liu and the other top contender for the post, Melinda Katz, also a City Council member, have both appeared in Riverdale. The two are neck-and-neck in the polls, with a recent WABCsponsored poll placing Ms. Katz just one percentage point ahead of Mr. Liu among likely voters. Ms. Katz has the endorsement of the local Benjamin Franklin Reform Democratic Club, widely regarded as a vote-getting powerhouse, and Rep. Eliot Engel, one of its members; Mr. Liu has big unions, including 1199 SEIU, which has several thousand members in the Riverdale/Kingsbridge area, and Rep. Charles Rangel. In the contest for the Ben Franklin nomination, Ms. Katz defeated Mr. Liu only after a runoff.

With the city likely to face tough fiscal times in the next four years, the position has perhaps grown in importance. The comptroller is responsible for managing billions in the city’s pension funds and signs off on every expenditure the city makes — from contracts given out by mayoral agencies to cash handed over at the discretion of City Council members. Candidates have hung their hats in part on a promise to stand up to Mr. Bloomberg as the city’s chief financial officer.

While Ms. Katz has the local endorsement, Mr. Liu enjoys a comfortable lead in fundraising, and says he also boasts considerably higher name recognition than other candidates.

The next comptroller will be the first with the ability to audity the mayor’s Department of Education, which Mr. Liu says he would do extensively. And he would audit the operations of mayoral agencies, he said, not just their finances.

But some of the things he’s taking credit for are questionable. He says that he beat the state and city comptrollers in 2003, when he was chairman of the council’s transportation committee, to outing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for telling the public it was facing a large deficit and painting a rosier picture for potential bond purchasers. The MTA disputes having ever had two sets of books and courts later ruled that the omissions leading to the claim were not false or misleading.

As transportation chair, Mr. Liu hectored the MTA to spend $1.1 billion it had been given for security. The public benefit corporation then allocated what began as $212 million of that money for a sophisticated surveillance camera system.

Last April, contractor Lockheed Martin sued for the right to give up on installing the system, saying the MTA had made it too difficult to actually complete construction.

“I know that I was pressuring the MTA to do something, but not to waste any money,” said Mr. Liu, who also worked as a manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the financial consulting firm.

Throughout this campaign, Mr. Liu has referenced his own story: He says he grew up working with his mother in a sweatshop. But as the New York Daily News explored his version of history, Mr. Liu put reporters in touch with people — including his own mother — who said he was in the factory only occasionally, and doing most of the work at home with his mother.

Mr. Liu says his mother may have been too embarrassed to explain the extent of his family’s work in the sweatshop, and that the News has misunderstood the way sweatshops work. The incident has created a sizeable amount of bad publicity.

This is part of the August 27, 2009 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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