Tribeca district leaders trounced by challengers to the north & south

BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | Terri Cude and Dennis Gault easily beat incumbents Jean Grillo and John Scott in Thursday’s election for Democratic district leader in the 66^th Assembly District, Part B, winning more than two-thirds of the vote.

The district stretches from the Washington Square area down to Battery Park City.

More than 1,200 voters cast ballots Sept. 10 in the race for district leader, which is the lowest political office and is unsalaried.

Cude and Gault won the district’s Greenwich Village portion by more than 280 votes — with 120 of that coming from 505 LaGuardia Place. They took Soho by more than 200 votes and Noho by about 50. Scott and Grillo, both from Tribeca, carried their neighborhood by around 100 ballots, most of that from Independence Plaza North, where Scott lives. The votes were roughly even in the district’s East Village portion, while Cude and Gault won Battery Park City, where Gault lives, in a low turnout.

———————

——————-

“I am humbled to have had the support of the people of my district,” Gault wrote on his Facebook page. “All across Downtown Manhattan, there are people that I owe a great debt of thanks to. I want to thank all of the people who started volunteering with me from the beginning. You made calls, knocked on doors, you raised funds, you formed rallies, you worked hard to bring us to victory.

He is a public school teacher and longtime member of Community Board 1 and its B.P.C. Committee.

He and his running mate were backed by three local political clubs, Downtown Independent Democrats, Village Reform Democratic Club and the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, while Grillo and Scott were backed by their own club, Downtown Progressive Democrats. Scott and Grillo had broken away from D.I.D. and formed D.P.D., largely over their support for Councilmember Margaret Chin.

Speaking on Friday, her first day as a district leader, Cude said that she worked hard over the course of her three-month campaign.

“I was out every day,” she said. “When it rained, I made phone calls or hung out under the canopy at Morton Williams supermarket. My God, do the people at Morton Williams know me!”

She said the issues ranged from, of course, New York University’s mega-development project in the South Village and overdevelopment, in general, to schools, parks and lack of bus service —“transit was huge, it’s huge throughout the district,” — to, specifically in Soho, “over-illumination” by ads and illegal, oversize retail stores.

It was really the N.Y.U. project, however, that inspired Cude — who is currently also first vice chairperson on Community Board 2 and has been on the board for five years — to start thinking of running for office. Cude lives just a half block from the university’s South Village superblocks, for which the nearly 2-million-square-foot project is slated.

City officials, though, did not do much to trim down the project, in the view of Cude and many others who voted for her.

“All we got was a haircut,” she said of the changes made to the project’s size.

Meanwhile, her election opponents had the support of numerous local politicians, including U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Assemblymember Deborah Glick and State Sen. Daniel Squadron. Twenty-two other district leaders also endorsed the incumbents.

But at the end of the day, it didn’t matter what the elected officials said: The voters knew exactly who they wanted representing them.

“I feel the electeds endorse incumbents,” Cude noted. “They circle the wagons. I’ve worked well with electeds. I’ll work even better with them now. As a district leader, I hope to be a more effective representative. Now I’m an elected, too.”

Meanwhile, asked for comment, Scott, in an e-mail response, complained of “character assassination” on the part of Cude and Gault’s supporters. “A picture is worth 1,000 words,” he said, referring to a particularly negative campaign flier.

The Villager, a Downtown Express sister publication, endorsed Gault and Cude, but Scott pointed out that the editorial did not mention that he, too, opposed the N.Y.U. plan and that he had stood with seniors at Our Lady of Pompeii Church when their day center was threatened.

For her part, Glick called The Villager shortly before the election and said she would like to know if Cude and Gault planned to repudiate negative, inaccurate information that was put out about their opponents.

Cude said she had not seen any negative materials and could not comment.

She assured that she would be ready to do her job in the next election: District leaders’ main responsibility is to turn out the vote during elections and make sure the polls are running smoothly.

“I’m learning about poll site operation,” she assured. “I’m not interested in running for a higher office.”

Working on her own and with local community groups, she also has held free events to help tykes learn to ride bikes and provide them with ID cards, as well as give people access to a document shredder.

“The city can be very cold,” she said. “But when we get together, we can have a lot of fun.”

In a statement, Sean Sweeney, a leader in D.I.D. and in Soho, said Cude and Gault’s win is par for the course for the powerful Downtown political club.

“D.I.D. has never lost a district leadership challenge — whether on the East Side or the West Side — batting 9-0 since 2009,” he proclaimed. “And our victories usually are in the 80 percent range.

“This year’s landslide result … demonstrates once again that a dedicated group of grassroots activists have far more influence … than do all the endorsements of the career politicians…. The politicians robo-called; we made hundreds of personal phone calls. They sat in their offices; we drove seniors in taxis to vote.”

In addition, in the election for judicial delegates — which covered the entire Assembly district — all six candidates on the slate backed by V.R.D.C., D.I.D. and Jim Owles, as well as the Village Independent Democrats, were elected.

With reporting by JOSH ROGERS