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For Gioia's admirers and detractors alike, it was a moment to savor. There was Eric Gioia, the articulate spokesman for the little guy, standing up to a bungling big business being defended by the wealthy mayor. Or, there was Eric Gioia, the unabashed publicity hound, chasing headlines and flashbulbs with over-earnest sound bites.
This September, Democratic primary voters will decide whether either Eric Gioia the crusader or Eric Gioia the publicity addict—or some combination of both—ought to become the city's next public advocate. In the most recent Marist Poll, Gioia is running last in the field of four, which includes fellow Councilman Bill de Blasio (whom City Limits profiled here), former public advocate Mark Green and civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel. But Gioia has already raised more money than any public advocate candidate in history and says he is putting together an unprecedented volunteer network to win what many predict will be a low-turnout primary.
"Part of what I believe is if you engage people, you can—block by block—change the city," the 36-year-old candidate explained in mid-May at a coffee shop in Long Island City, a neighborhood he represents along with Astoria, Maspeth, Sunnyside and Woodside in City Council. "The overarching idea is getting people to believe again that government can do better."
The public advocate, an office unique to New York City, is technically the number two citywide official, meaning he or she takes over if the mayoralty is vacated. But the office's true purpose is to collect citizen complaints, investigate city agencies and offset the power of the executive branch in New York's strong-mayor system. It's a vague set of duties on which each 2009 candidate is putting his own spin. Gioia's take is that the public advocate ought to be an arbiter of social justice. "The job of public advocate is to find people who need somebody on their side and stick up for them any way you can," he says. "And not just to yell and scream, but to deliver measurable achievements."
Ambitious climb
He comes to the job, he says, from his own working-class background – witnessing the struggles of his parents, who ran a flower shop in Woodside, not having health insurance as a kid, working his way through New York University as a janitor, nearly flunking out, and then working through Georgetown Law. He clerked in the White House deputy counsel's office, and after passing the bar practiced law at the Manhattan firm of Milbank Tweed Hadley McCoy. Then he ran for the City Council's 26th District seat, which was also being sought by four other men—one of whom, Matthew Farrell, had the support of the Queens County Democratic organization.
By all accounts that 2001 Council campaign got nasty. At one point, a flyer circulated about Farrell getting arrested in 1988, when he was 17; the flyer advocated a vote for Gioia. Gioia and another candidate in the race, Queens Community Board 2 chairman Joseph Conley, accused one another of producing the flyer, which became an issue in the campaign. "We challenged him to a lie detector test that he refused to take. All of a sudden Eric Gioia was too busy to take the test," says Conley. Gioia says he called on the Queens district attorney to investigate and claims that, in a phone conversation, Farrell (who has since died) said he did not think Gioia was responsible.
Gioia won a solid victory on primary day, earning 43 percent of the vote, beating his nearest competitor by 2,900 votes out of 11,400 cast. In the general election, he beat his only opponent—a Green Party candidate—by a 14-to-1 margin. Conley says Gioia then tried to have him removed from the community board. Gioia contends he never directly asked for Conley's removal.
Once on the Council, Gioia got to work advancing his priorities. Today he points to achievements like writing the Young Adult Voter Registration Act, which requires city schools to provide to each graduating high school senior a postage-paid voter registration form. He's also advocated for the city's budget to include money to reimburse school teachers for supplies, conducted investigations that helped shape the city's emergency contraception law and passed legislation providing incentives to private developers to create middle-class housing in Queens. In 2005, he authored a bill that would permit people to apply for food stamps online; it survived a mayoral veto to become law.
Gioia says friends in his district warned him early on that his liberal record—refusing to march in the Manhattan St. Patrick's Day parade because it excluded gays, breaking with many Queens colleagues to back a 2003 resolution opposing the Iraq war—could be a liability in the neighborhoods he represents. But Gioia was reelected easily in both 2003 and 2005.
Gioia's Council committee work has centered around the panel he chairs, Oversight & Investigations, which according to a Citizens Union tally held fewer hearings—a mere six—from 2006 through 2008 than any other Council committee. Gioia, who is a member of seven committees and one subcommittee, is often seen making very late and very brief appearances at Council hearings.
"You try to be at all the hearings, especially the important ones. The truth is, I try to spend as much time as I can outside of City Hall—in the neighborhoods, talking to folks," Gioia says. He notes that the Oversight committee is exempt from a requirement other panels face to hold a hearing every month, because his committee's work is different. "The nature of investigations is not to have hearings," he says. "We release reports instead." In the past year, Gioia's committee has released findings on topics like milk price gouging and the lack of banking services for public housing residents. Gioia's 88.74 percent attendance rate for hearings in 2008 ranked him 27th out of the Council's 51 members.
When the Council voted by a fairly narrow margin to support congestion pricing last year, Gioia was one of the ayes. Though Gioia says he expressed nuanced views on the issue over the months of debate on it, his Council colleague Tony Avella has suggested that Gioia cast his "yes" vote to curry favor with Mayor Bloomberg and Council Speaker Christine Quinn. Gioia, who says the pricing scheme was "wildly unpopular" in his district, contends that "my position was very consistent": He had concerns about the impact of the plan on lower-income people that were partially addressed by amendments the mayor made to his plan as the vote approached.
From 2006 through 2008, according to Citizens Union, Gioia cast 30 "no" votes on the Council. Only nine of his colleagues broke with Quinn more often.
In 2007, the Council voted to landmark a section of Sunnyside Gardens in Queens after a bitter fight in the neighborhood over the plan, which some thought was an essential defense against overdevelopment and others worried would impose high costs on middle-class homeowners. Gioia came out in support of landmarking shortly before its passage. In an e-mail to constituents, he wrote that Sunnyside Gardens is "the neighborhood I've chosen to live in with my family and where I plan to raise my daughter." But Gioia's home is actually just outside the landmark district—a fact that he alluded to in the same e-mail, but that some in the district thought he glossed over.
There were other complaints about how Gioia handled the controversial issue. "I think one of the good things Eric Gioia did was he [distributed] a survey asking people what they wanted preserved," says Ira Greenberg, a local lawyer who opposed the landmarking. But the survey's results were never publicized. "It would have been good to see the results," Greenberg added. Gioia's aides say the survey was not a yes/no questionnaire and that it revealed that the district was sharply divided over the issue.
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All in the delivery
Gioia's stump speech revolves around the belief that there are vast injustices in New York City, especially along the lines of class and race. Asthma, for instance, affects the poor and the non-white disproportionately. The question is what he would do as public advocate – a role with limited powers and budget – to engage such a large problem.
"It begins by believing that this is not an intractable," he said. "The fib that we've been sold is that these issues such as poverty are so intractable that the best we can do is a Band-Aid." Gioia says the advocate, for instance, could follow the example of Boston Medical Center, a hospital that hired lawyers to pursue landlords who'd failed to maintain their buildings, thus possibly worsening their residents' asthma. Or he could push legislation to remove toys containing phthalates—a plastic material linked in some studies to asthma—from city shelves. A federal ban is already in place but doesn't cover older toys.
Health care would be Gioia's top priority in office, he says, promising to personally sign up some of the 200,000 city kids who qualify for, but do not receive, subsidized health coverage. On another urban health issue, obesity, Gioia says his plan to ban new fast food restaurants from locating within a tenth of a mile of a city school is a practical step toward encouraging better eating by children. Alex Zablocki, a Republican seeking the public advocate post, has dismissed that proposal as a form of "nanny government."
Any candidate for public advocate is going to compare his approach to the two previous holders of the office: the incumbent, Betsy Gotbaum, who is in her second term; and Green, the first to hold the post, who served from 1994 through 2001.
"I think Betsy, she's done good work," says Gioia. "I think Mark is a talker and I'm a doer. I think in the past 10 years, be it on the radio or cable television, he's talked a pretty good game. But it's hard to think of a way he's changed people's lives."
Gioia says this as he nibbles on a breakfast of yogurt and muesli at Cafe Henri in Long Island City. He is running late today, because his father was tardy arriving for duty watching the councilman's 2-year-old daughter, Amelia. Gioia's wife, the former Lisa Esler, is at a separate table across the coffee shop doing paperwork. They met while working for Al Gore's 2000 campaign. A political consultant, Lisa Gioia is an adviser to her husband's campaign, which rents space from her office in the Graybar Building (an office tower on 42nd Street owned, ironically, by Mark Green's brother, Stephen Green).The city's Campaign Finance Board has advised Gioia's campaign that his wife may volunteer her services only as long as her firm makes no profit on the campaign.
The CFB has also ruled that Gioia can't spend public matching funds on one of the more unique aspects of his campaign: His purchase of carbon offsets which, combined with use of a hybrid car and mass transit, are supposed to produce a "carbon neutral campaign." The CFB says the market for carbon offsets is not sufficiently regulated to be a destination for taxpayer funds. Gioia also asked that what he spends on carbon offsets not count toward his spending limit; the CFB denied that request.
Telling the story
Carbon neutrality is one of several Gen Y aspects of Gioia's effort. In another, he's Twittering his way through the race. "Happy that Bill Thompson is joining our fight to get Costco to accept food stamps," read a posting for May 20th. (All punctuation is Gioia's own.) On May 17 he wrote, "Greenday is playing bowery ballroom and webster hall this week, I'm tempted to play hookie from campaign trail :)" On May 6, there were two postings: "Excited for my birthday party tonight at union square ballroom. hope to see everyone there" and "Just got home from my party, thanks everyone for coming. Great night. Now I am going to watch American Idol on tivo."
Is all this, as the kids might say, "tmi"? Gioia's been promoting himself aggressively outside his Queens district for years, holding major fundraisers as far back as 2006. Exposure does not seem to be something he's afraid of. Even as a law student, he was on the small screen as a frequent panelist on CNN's "Burden of Proof" (its host, Greta van Susteren, was one of Gioia's Georgetown professors). Gioia recently announced his wife's pregnancy with their second child at a campaign fundraiser.
All the outreach is fodder for his critics. "The most dangerous place to be in Queens is between Eric and a TV camera," says Ann Eagan, Gioia's Green Party opponent in 2001. "He gets his face in the papers." Kieran Staunton, a Woodside bar owner, contends that "From day one, he's been running for better things. He's merely passing through."
Gioia both dismisses and accepts the critique. "I think it's a misread of me," he says of the publicity hound label, and denies any interest in offices higher than that of public advocate. "I have been attracted to this job for a very long time." But he adds, "I'm much more aggressive [than others] on issues that previously didn't get a lot of attention," like food stamps.
Getting publicity, in other words, is part of the job (something Gotbaum explains she's had a hard time doing). "I try to shine a light on injustices. When people learn a set of facts about injustices, most good people say, 'that shouldn't be,'" he says. "In order to mobilize a coalition of good people you need to be able to tell a story of the wrongs that have been perpetrated."
If the earnestness seems a little saccharine, Gioia suspects that reaction might be a symptom of how jaded people have become about politics. He has resisted the cynicism, he claims: "I remain very idealistic."
Gioia—who outspent his opponents by seventeen-fold in '03 and seven-fold in '05—has the bucks to back up those ideals. With $2.2 million raised to date and almost $1.7 million in the bank, Gioia has more than three times what any of his opponents have on hand. Some $390,000 of Gioia's money has come from donors giving the maximum $4,950 contribution—a list of givers that includes supermarket magnate John Catsimatidis, Mark Green's brother Stephen Green (his check predated his brother's entry to the race) and several top developers including the Durst Organization, Kaufman Realty, the Walentas family and the Related Companies' Stephen Ross.
The question is whether Gioia's money and energy—one observer likened him to an "Energizer Bunny"—will be enough to defeat de Blasio's growing list of endorsements, Green's name recognition and Siegel's dedicated following among progressives. Another question is how the mayoral race, or lack thereof, affects the September 15th primary. Gioia has little to say about Bloomberg: Asked what he thinks of the mayor's record, Gioia only says, "What's refreshing about him is he's not beholden to any special interest. I think as public advocate you have to have the independence to stand up to him but also the confidence to work with him."
Running to replace Gioia in his 26th District Council seat are Deirdre Feerick, an attorney who works for the city; Brent O'Leary, a lawyer for Bloomberg LP; David Rosasco, a businessman; and James Van Bramer, a Queens Library official.
This is the third in a series of articles about the race for public advocate. Next issue: former public advocate Mark Green.
