Text size:

Scandal leaves Quinn's future hanging in the balance

By David Freedlander, amNewYork Staff Writer | dfreedlander@am-ny.com

7:55 PM EDT, April 16, 2008

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who has made budget reform and transparency a centerpiece of her likely '09 run, will have to quickly put the widening scandal in the council behind her to keep her mayoral hopes alive, politics analysts said Wednesday.

Wednesday's news -- that two top staffers of Councilmember Kendall Stewart (D-Brooklyn) had been indicted on federal fraud charges -- didn't involve Quinn (D-Manhattan). But the spreading air of corruption now threatens to engulf her '09 mayoral run, observers said.

"The finger is squarely pointed at her," said Basil Smikle, a lecturer on public affairs at Columbia University and a veteran of several state and citywide campaigns. "She is going to have to explain in great detail how any of this happened under her watch, and her opponents will be able to ask if this is really someone you want as mayor."

Earlier this month it was revealed that Quinn's office was allocating millions of dollars of taxpayer money to non-existent non-profits. Quinn has said that she notified authorities when she learned of the practice.

The last two council speakers to run for mayor, Gifford Miller in 2005 and Peter Vallone, Sr. in 2001, both flopped badly despite prognosticators pegging them as likely winners early on.

The question now is whether Quinn can avoid that same fate, said Joseph Mercurio, who ran the 2005 mayoral campaign of then-Manhattan borough president Virginia Fields.

"It's tough to run for higher office from that kind of position," he said. "The mayor gets all the credit for what's happened and the speaker gets all the fallout for everything that's bad."

Other likely candidates for mayor include City Comptroller Bill Thompson, Congressman Anthony Weiner and Councilman Tony Avella. Last week Quinn announced a series of reforms designed to clean up the budget process, but the initiatives were nearly universally panned by councilmembers, many of whom felt that it ceded far too much power to the mayor.

"She's got to get in front of this story and capture the reform mantle," said Hank Sheinkopf, who helped run the 2001 mayoral campaign of Mark Green. "She has to be able to say, 'We dealt with the authorities, arrests were made, and now let's get on to the business of real reform.' She has the track record to do that."

Two long-time Quinn antagonists, Councilmen Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn) and Avella(D-Bayside), have repeatedly called on the speaker to step down.

"It happened on her watch," Avella said. "I find it hard to believe the spin that she told these people to stop. It doesn't add up"

Although word of so-called slush funds in Quinn's discretionary budget has been bubbling for weeks, some doubted that an arcane piece of council budgetary practice would be the issue that dominates an election 17 months away.

"This is an issue about the internal processes of the council. It's not something the public really gets their arms around," said George Arzt, former press secretary to former mayor Ed Koch. "I've dealt with the council since 1968 and I don't completely get it."

The real question though before political tea-leaf readers was exactly Quinn's involvement in a scandal that while on her watch, as of yet had not reached her.

"The indictments today probably won't be the last," Smikle said. "Given the amount of money and the amount of time that has passed, I imagine this story will go pretty deep."

Quinn addressed the scandal involving Stewart's staffers briefly yesterday.

"Obviously news of these criminal charges are sad news for the city and sad news for this institution, but we will have to await further information and results of the legal process before we have any further comment on the matter," she said.