After presiding over a wild 13-hour Brooklyn Democratic Party Zoom meeting last week, the party’s ceremonial chair Carlo Scissura resigned from his position Monday.
The party’s executive committee will convene Tuesday morning at 9 am to fill his vacancy ahead of Wednesday, when the full party resumes its recessed meeting, according to an internal notice obtained by Brooklyn Paper.
A spokeswoman for the party declined to comment further on his sudden resignation and Scissura did not return requests for comment by press time.
Scissura previously announced he wouldn’t be seeking re-election this year, but the move precludes him from presiding over the continuation of the lengthy meeting scheduled for Dec. 23.
The party’s 42-member executive committee elected Scissura in January for the largely ceremonial leadership role of the Kings County Democratic County Committee — the party’s official name — at a closed-door meeting.
He was nominated by Frank Seddio, the former chair of the executive committee —a position that wields more power thus giving it the popular designation “party boss” — and the arrival of the veteran businessman ushered in hopes that he would be able to tame the often chaotic full county meetings.
Scissura is known for heading up the construction industry trade group the New York Building Congress and previously served as president and chief executive officer of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce.
He also worked for former Borough President Marty Markowitz as chief of staff and ran for his boss’s position in 2012, before dropping out to take the Brooklyn Chamber gig.
Mayor Bill de Blasio also appointed Scissura to lead the expert panel which spent the better part of 2019 studying fixes for the crumbling Brooklyn-Queens Expressway triple-cantilever section that wraps around Brooklyn Heights.
Scissura’s experience was no match for a tough crowd during last week’s multi-marathon inaugural virtual meeting of the full Brooklyn Democratic Party, which was marred by party vote tabulators counting more votes than exist while reformers called for more transparency.
Toward the end of the meeting, reform-oriented politicos, chiefly among them the club New Kings Democrats, secured a slate of progressive victories to overhaul some of the party’s Byzantine laws and obscure power structures.
