Here we go again! It definitely raised eyebrows at Community Board 2 last week when longtime Soho activist Sean Sweeney was not reappointed to the board, which includes the Village, Soho, Noho and Little Italy. An influential presence Downtown, Sweeney is executive director of the Soho Alliance community organization and also a power in the Downtown Independent Democrats political club. One veteran C.B. 2 member told us, requesting anonymity, that there are suspicions that Sweeney’s removal was — surprise, surprise — because of his ongoing clash with Councilmember Margaret Chin. Sweeney and Chin previously famously feuded over the Soho Business Improvement District — Sweeney and the majority of Soho residents opposed it, but Chin backed it, and the new BID was approved by the city. More recently, it’s been war between the two after Chin backed Gigi Li’s effort to challenge Jenifer Rajkumar for district leader last year — only to wind up with Community Board 3 Chairperson Li having to withdraw from the race after she failed to collect enough valid ballot petition signatures and, even worse, in the face of actual petition fraud charges filed by Rajkumar supporters. That obviously was a big embarrassment for Li and her patron, Chin, and also potentially politically damaging for Li — just how badly, we’ll see in September, when Li, Rajkumar and a slew of other candidates, including the new Assembly incumbent, Alice Cancel, will run in the Democratic primary for former Speaker Sheldon Silver’s seat. In fact, Chin bumped Sweeney off the before over the Soho BID brouhaha. Sweeney said there’s no way his attendance at meetings can be to blame for why he got the boot this time. “My attendance is very good, obsessively so,” he said. “O.K., so I miss the month of February. Big deal — I can’t take a month vacation?… It’s public knowledge that Chin did not reappoint me in 2012, the year I organized the Soho community against the Soho BID that she tried to push down our throats. And yes, I was very involved last summer in exposing the fraudulent petition signatures that Chin’s protégé Gigi presented to the Board of Elections. And yes, Chin has a history of vindictiveness,” Sweeney said. After he was dropped from C.B. 2 four years ago by Chin, then-Borough President Scott Stringer promptly “picked up” Sweeney and put him back on the board. When Gale Brewer became borough president in 2014, she renewed Sweeney’s appointment — yet she didn’t renew him this year. The question is why? So far, neither Brewer or Chin are answering. “We don’t ever comment on appointment/nonappointment reasons,” said John Houston, Brewer’s spokesperson. Similarly, when Brewer did not reappoint Ayo Harrington to the East Side’s C.B. 3 last April, her office declined to comment on the reason why. Harrington of course was the most vocal critic on C.B. 3 of Li’s leadership of the board, her accusations sparking a full-blown Equal Employment Opportunity investigation into whether Li was failing to appoint blacks and Latinos to committee leadership positions. Hmm…does there seem to be a pattern here? Perhaps if you want to stay a member of C.B. 2 or 3, you better lay off Li! Or else Brewer will bounce you! Meanwhile, a Chin source said she wasn’t commenting on “Sweeney’s Second Removal,” either, noting that Brewer was the one who would have to explain why since she was the one who ultimately made the decision not to reappointment the Soho activist. Speaking of Rajkumar, she wasted no time announcing her campaign for Assembly this week, hot on the heels of Cancel’s victory in the April 19 special election for the Assembly seat. Cancel was the only Democrat allowed to run in that race. The September primary will be open to all Dems who qualify to get on the ballot.
Rubbing it in: Assemblymember Deborah Glick was quick to point out that her September primary election rival, Arthur Schwartz, did not make the cut as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in July — at least not based on results of last week’s presidential primary in the 10th Congressional District, which includes the Village. Based on Hillary Clinton’s performance in the district versus that of Bernie Sanders, the former won four delegates compared to the latter’s two. The Clinton delegates are Glick, Comptroller Scott Stringer, former Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum and George Miranda. For Sanders, the two delegates are former state Senator Tom Duane and Jenine Lurie. “I came in third on our slate,” Schwartz said. “If Bernie had gotten one more delegate in our congressional district, I would have been elected. I was not surprised that I ran behind Duane; the 10th C.D. included almost all of his old Senate district. I fully expect to be named to one of the slots Bernie gets to fill as a result of the statewide vote, and will be a delegate to the convention.” Schwartz, who is Sanders’s New York campaign counsel, said he also expects gay political activist Allen Roskoff, who also ran as a delegate on the local Sanders slate, to be tapped to attend the convention. “The Sanders campaign has 36 or so slots to fill. Hillary has 48,” Schwartz noted of the coveted remaining spots. Ben Yee, who is running for Democratic State Committee, and lives on the East Side, was elected as a Bernie delegate in the 12th Congressional District. The Village Independent Democrats recently endorsed Yee for State Committee over former District Leader John Scott. “Ben is a rising star,” Schwartz said. (Scoopy recently reported that Yee is a board officer in V.I.D, but that was incorrect.)
Double dribbling: As most readers may already know, former Assembly Speaker Silver’s corruption trial has been rescheduled to May 3. In other Silver developments — and, boy, have there been some doozies! — we recently learned that the once-powerful pol, who is married, was cavorting with two married blondes up in Albany, lobbyist Pat Lynch and former Assemblymember Janele Hyer-Spencer. Hyer-Spencer, who reportedly sports pierced nipples and a tattoo above her derrière, roars around on a Yamaha motorcycle and has a mean hook shot on the hoops court. We know Silver was a legend on the Lower East Side at the Luther Gulick Playground blacktop courts as a kid and then played ball up in Albany with other power brokers, so we could kind of get that, if he had a mistress, it would at least be someone who could take it the rim and knock down jump shots. But we wouldn’t exactly have pictured the Orthodox Grand Streeter with a hot motorcycle mama! Oh well, just another thing we didn’t know about Silver, we guess. As for Lynch, who was his press secretary for six years before starting her own lobbying firm, in fact, we had always heard whisperings that there was something between them, so the revelations of their relationship did not exactly shock us. Indeed, the media are reporting that it was an “open secret” in Albany and that the two were caught canoodling in the elevator at the State Capitol and so forth. “Ah, it’s good to be the king — or the speaker,” as Mel Brooks might say. That is, until you face serious jail time! Beyond the salacious details, the two women clearly benefited from their relationships with Silver. Hyer-Spencer went on to get plum positions with the Department of Education and Staten Island Family Court, with Silver’s help, sources told the New York Post. Meanwhile, Silver certainly looked like a hero when he blocked former Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s West Side stadium. Meanwhile, Lynch was a lobbyist for Madison Square Garden, which obviously feared the competition the arena would pose. Manhattan Federal Judge Valerie Caproni recently released an opinion on Silver’s mistresses and how they benefited from the connection. “They arguably are not entirely ‘innocent’ third parties,” she wrote. “Each allegedly had an extramarital affair with a public official and then exploited her relationship with the public official for personal gain.”
