City council candidates race to frenzied finish

Oliver Koppell, Tony Perez Cassino

Primary day is Sept. 15

By N. Clark Judd

Oliver Koppell, seeking his third consecutive term as Riverdale’s City Councilman, marched from one end of the district to the other on Monday, accompanied by bagpipes.

Tony Perez Cassino, the man seeking to replace him, spent his Labor Day campaigning, too — visiting parks, pools and shopping districts throughout the district.

On Tuesday, Sept. 15, Democratic voters in the 11th City Council District — from Riverdale to Spuyten Duyvil and east to Bedford Park, Norwood and Woodlawn — will pick one of these two men to be their next City Council member, pending a general election in November.

Mr. Koppell, 68, and Mr. Cassino, 44, are dramatically different. One is a product of Riverdale’s Democratic Party apparatus, a public servant with decades of experience but a willingness to make politically inconvenient allies that has cost him more than one setback. The other built up his political base in the last five years as a leader on the local community board by paying attention to local issues that others seemed to have overlooked — and with the help of friendly relations with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión Jr.

Koppell’s focus

Mr. Koppell, a supporter said recently, believes his primary job as a City Councilman is to “make laws.”

But district needs play a greater role than they do at the state level, Mr. Koppell says.

“You really need to be a pothole councilman to do the job right,” he said.

Mr. Koppell has not had a clear answer this year when asked what projects he would take up or continue if he had four more years in office. Perhaps the largest case of unfinished business is the question of a complex adjacent to the Kingsbridge Armory. The National Guard is still using that complex, but he is trying to help broker a deal in which the Guard would relocate and the complex would come available as a possible site for two schools.

He thinks Riverdale is the way it should be, and would focus on keeping the neighborhood as it is.

Compared with what was widely considered to be a successful Assembly career that spanned 23 years, the early years of Mr. Koppell’s City Council tour were marred by tiffs with the reigning city administration and the Bronx political powers- that-be. In the later years of his time in the council, he has had success as an author of legislation with the environment as its primary focus, and garnered support from social services providers for his work as chairman of a council committee on mental heath, mental disabilities and addiction. His latest legislation makes it mandatory for some auto parking garages to rent parking spaces to bicycle riders as well.

In the district, Mr. Koppell points to major capital projects as the foundation of his legacy. He holds up the new Kingsbridge library — now under construction — as a capstone. He was an advocate for the David A. Stein Riverdale Kingsbridge Academy, MS/HS 141 while a member of the local school board, and recently announced that a new school in the works for Norwood will be built in part at his urging.

He has said he would continue to support city subsidies for affordable housing, including a pilot program to give developers incentives to turn now-vacant buildings into housing for middle-income or working- class people. However, he believes the vacancies in commercial real estate in Riverdale will take care of themselves.

Cassino’s focus

Mr. Cassino, in contrast, built his political base by concentrating on issues like unanswered complaints to the city Department of Buildings, potholes in need of filling and a close watch over disruptive projects like the installation last year of a high-voltage power line that now runs underneath some of Riverdale’s busiest commercial areas.

A graduate of New York University Law School, Mr. Cassino became chairman of Board 8 in 2004 and serves as an assistant director of pro bono work at a major law firm in lower Manhattan.

He points to the down-zoning of Riverdale and Kingsbridge, which prevented the construction of any more tall apartment buildings in the area and passed in his first year as board chairman, as one of his accomplishments.

Mr. Koppell was one of the City Council members to vote in the current zoning guidelines the year before, and claims credit as a shepherd of the zoning rules, too.

“We both worked together on a number of issues that were important,” Mr. Cassino said, but adds that it was Board 8 that put together the zoning proposal the City Council voted on. In fact, the zoning guidelines were based on years of work on the part of the board that began years before Mr. Cassino was chairman. He takes credit for the push to get it passed.

Mr. Cassino’s other signature issue, the reduction of alternate-side parking days in most of the Riverdale/Kingsbridge area — which stemmed, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said, from a Board 8 initiative — is still in the works.

Mr. Cassino has also identified issues such as attempting to make changes to the water rate, property taxes, the shape of zones for local schools, and traffic as priorities.

He has offered concrete proposals for some issues, such as changing the way Community Education Councils work — an initiative that would require action by the state Legislature.

Mr. Cassino has spoken strongly against city programs that pay for temporary family housing in apartment buildings for homeless people, saying they could be “destabilizing” to the neighborhoods where they are located. He is also against a pilot program by the city to convert vacant units in rental and condo units into subsidized housing for working- or middleclass people, saying that buildings that are now largely vacant should not receive government help — the developers, he has said, should lower their prices.

On the other hand, he believes the city should take steps to fill commercial real estate vacancies.

Controversies

Both candidates have come under fire over the course of the campaign.

They and their surrogates have traded jabs about campaign finances, alleged sweetheart deals on rent and questions over spending; Mr. Koppell’s campaign rents a cubicle from his wife’s law firm, and Mr. Cassino’s campaign rents space in a closed-down nursery school from the family of his campaign treasurer. Each campaign says the other is paying below market rate.

But the rivals have tried to score the most points against one another on two key issues.”

Mr. Koppell widely enjoys a reputation as being ethically beyond reproach, and being willing to take the inconvenient path if it’s what he feels is the right thing to do. But he relies on support from political powerbrokers just as much as the next politician: he drew his ability to function in the City Council in part through a good working relationship with the former Bronx Democratic leader, Jose Rivera, whose son is the council majority leader and whose closest political ally still leads the Bronx City Council delegation. Out of a sense of loyalty to Mr. Rivera, he sided against the Riverdale political club that brings out the vote for him in a party power struggle last year. The club, the Benjamin Franklin Reform Democratic Club, kept him out in the cold over that issue — and on the issue of term limits, which he voted to extend to three terms despite two voter referendums — for months before formally restoring their support to him.

Mayor’s help

Mr. Cassino — though he has received help from former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión Jr., who appointed him to Board 8, and from Mr. Bloomberg, the mayor, whose administration has cooperated with him on his alternate-side parking initiative and named him to the board the newly formed Van Cortlandt Park Conservancy, where he was voted in as chairman — appears to have built his own political clout independent of the Democratic Party machinery.

Mr. Cassino drew early attention as a prolific campaign fundraiser, especially unusual for an insurgent candidate — but he did it while he was Board 8’s chairman and, later, chairman of its traffic and transportation committee. Among his campaign contributions are thousands of dollars from developers and multiple contributions from lobbyists who represent real estate interests.

He has insisted that he can safely recuse himself when their interests come before the board and could do the same if elected to the City Council.

Attorneys who are lobbyists, he says, are friends he has made during his career as a lawyer.

This is part of the September 10, 2009 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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