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The Green Party is generally considered a minor party, but in City Council District 22, Lynne Serpe has launched a vigorous campaign, collected four times the number of voter signatures she needs to secure a spot on the ballot and built up a bank account on par with the incumbent.
Serpe said she thinks her campaign has been gaining steam because Astoria residents are ready for a change after eight years of Peter Vallone Jr. serving as their councilman, and because few take issue with her main priorities.
“They all want the basics: clean air, clean water, clean streets and clean energy,” Serpe said.
The candidate, who works for a nonprofit that helps lower- and middle-income families weatherize their homes, said she would fight further term limit extensions, address what many in the community see as “predatory ticketing,” help open a new supermarket in Astoria, work to create more green spaces, install benches and recycling bins on some streets and push for seven-day library service.
To stimulate the local economy, Serpe said she would work to maintain the area as an industrial base, with a focus on green jobs. She wants to promote solar energy, which she said could create employment opportunities for people installing solar panels, reduce long-term energy costs, benefit the environment and help the area become a solar panel manufacturing hub.
To ensure the availability of affordable housing, Serpe advocates regulations that would require 40 percent of new units in any given development to be priced for low- and middle-income families.
A quota by itself isn’t enough though, she said; the city must also re-evaluate its definition of “affordable.” Rates are often based on income levels in the greater metropolitan area, not just the city, she added.
Regarding the general look of Astoria, Serpe advocates curbing out-of-character development by toughening zoning rules.
“More and more buildings out of context have been built in quiet, residential neighborhoods,” she said.
Serpe is on the executive board of the Long Island City Alliance, which pushed for a rezoning study for Astoria — a project Vallone adopted. The Department of City Planning recently finalized rezoning plans, which would limit the size of buildings on many streets, with the goal of ensuring that new buildings fit with existing ones.
Serpe’s zoning concerns carry over to a proposed development in Hallett’s Point featuring seven skyscrapers. Serpe said she’s not opposed to the development but doesn’t see the need for 2,500 new apartments and worries that they could create more traffic snarls and put undue strain on the area’s infrastructure.
On law enforcement, Serpe said anti-crime efforts need to focus on community building, not just catching the bad guys.
Vallone, who chairs the Public Safety Committee, is known for his tough stance on graffiti and support for stop-and-frisk measures. But Serpe says police activity has led some in the community — particularly residents of public housing projects — to fear NYPD harassment on the basis of race and ethnicity.
“Public safety is about more than just crime statistics,” Serpe said. “I don’t support racial profiling in any shape or form.”
Overall, Serpe said, she would seek to be a strong liaison between city government and residents, keeping her constituents well informed about what’s going on and holding meetings throughout the district to gather input.
The candidate has raised about $100,000 including matching funds, only a few thousand less than Vallone.
Peter Vallone, Jr.
Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Astoria) prides himself on getting things done and is running for a third term in hopes of continuing his efforts of the past eight years.
When he first ran for office, Vallone promised to focus on public safety, the environment and schools, and he said those three areas would be priorities for his next term as well.
Vallone has written and passed 18 bills since he took office, which he said is more than any of his colleagues. He added that he has brought more money back to his district than anyone else and has forged valuable relationships with the mayor, the City Council speaker and other elected officials.
As chairman of the Public Safety Committee, Vallone is known for his tough stance on crime and is a strong proponent of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy, which he said “is the main way to stop crime before it happens.”
In response to complaints that the policy sometimes leads to racial profiling, Vallone agreed that more minorities are stopped but said the percentage of non-whites stopped mirrors the percentage of criminal complaints leveled against them.
The councilman has repeatedly spoken out against cuts to the Police Department, whose ranks have shrunk from about 41,000 in 2001 to 35,000 today.
Vallone isn’t just tough on violent crime; he also has been waging a longtime war against graffiti. The councilman wrote legislation that doubled the penalty for “tagging,” that required building owners to remove graffiti on their property and that restricted the purchase of etching acid — used to mark glass — by requiring buyers to show I.D.s. Each of those bills has become law.
Another Vallone bill, which has not yet come to a vote, would seek to phase out metal roll-down security gates in front of shop windows. The bill stipulates that when replacing security gates, owners would have to install see-through ones, which would be harder to mark with graffiti and would help police and firemen respond faster to emergencies inside, Vallone said.
At a neighborhood level, the councilman has been fighting the creation of new power plants.
“We don’t need all the city’s power plants to be in Astoria,” he said.
In 2003, a company called Astoria Energy got permission to build a 1,000-megawatt plant in the neighborhood and won contracts with both Con Edison and the New York Power Authority, thereby gaining the funding necessary to start construction. Opposing the new plant is an uphill battle, Vallone conceded, but he’s doing it anyway.
Also on the environment front, Vallone wrote legislation requiring that the city accept plastic bags for recycling. Supermarkets larger than 5,000 square feet are now required to have bins where customers can deposit bags and other similar plastic items.
As for education, Vallone, whose daughters attended public schools until high school, has ensured that security cameras were installed in all the district’s schools.
Although Vallone has already spent a significant amount of his campaign money on office rent and other overhead costs and thus will likely be outspent two-to-one in the final weeks before the election, the councilman said he’s confident he’ll win, adding that he has deep roots in the neighborhood.
“I’ve virtually spent every day of my life in Astoria,” he said. “I’ve probably driven up and down Ditmars Boulevard more than any other person alive.”
The law firm that Vallone’s grandfather opened in 1932 on 31st Street is still in the family, and various Vallones have held public office in the city over the past few generations.
Jerry Kann
This is Jerry Kann’s third bid for City Council. The former Green Party candidate is running on the Populist ticket, and his priorities for office include increasing income taxes for those who earn more than $500,000, lowering sales taxes, revamping rent regulations to favor tenants and instituting elected community councils that would have a say in neighborhood issues.
Kann said he would hold monthly meetings to gather residents’ input and wants communities to be able to vote on development projects.
Kann, who has raised $308, said he is outraged at the amount of money some candidates spend on campaigns and added that he feels Mayor Mike Bloomberg “bought” his election.
