Among the most sought-after posts this election season is the job of public advocate.
While some legislators have promoted the idea of eliminating the position, which is mandated by the City Charter, such disdain hasn’t stopped numerous pols from setting their sights on the position, which functions as an ombudsman for city residents as well as a watchdog over the mayor and City Council.
Two of this group, former Public Advocate Mark Green and City Councilmember Eric Gioia, both seeking the Democratic nod on primary day, September 15th, appeared in Canarsie recently to ask residents to cast their votes in their direction.
While Gioia and Green availed themselves of the opportunity to speak during the candidates forum held earlier this month by Friends United Block Association (FUBA), at Temple Shaare Emeth, 6012 Farragut Road, the other candidates, Norman Siegel and Bill DeBlasio, did not.
“There has been a lot of talk in the past couple of months about whether we need a public advocate,” noted City Councilmember Lew Fidler, who introduced Green. “You never heard that talk when Mark Green was public advocate.”
“I’ve been a consumer cop all my life,” noted Green, who began his career as one of Nader’s raiders, and was the city’s commissioner of consumer affairs before being elected to the position of public advocate in1993, a position he held until term-limited out in 2001.
While the average policeman patrols the streets, “I try to protect you from the crime in the suites,” he quipped.
A key aspect to his approach, Green said, is that, “Those less favored in life should be more favored in law.
“My whole goal was to expose a problem and solve it,” he added. To that end, he told the group, he had sponsored legislation that would prevent a business from firing an employee simply for being a victim of domestic violence after someone in that situation had brought the issue to his attention. “That’s seeing a problem and helping people in real, dire need.”
In addition, after an investigation his office conducted revealed that “The poor pay more for less,” his office approached national retailers such as Pathmark to bring them into the city’s poorer communities. “The whole goal is to help people who can’t hire big lawyers and lobbyists,” Green averred.
He kept a close eye on then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani during his two terms as public advocate, Green recalled. “I should have gotten time and a half for that,” he noted, adding, “The only way to stop a bully is to stand up to a bully.”
And, he concluded, “I promise, if you help me become public advocate, if you think I did well for you before, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
For his part, Gioia positioned himself as a political outsider. “I’m not the insider candidate. I’m the independent Democrat,” he told the group, noting that when he won election to the City Council in 2001, it was despite having no political backing, and being told that he had no chance of victory. Yet, he said, “We beat the machine, three to one.”
“I’m running for public advocate for a very simple reason,” Gioia stressed. “I think I could make a difference in people’s lives.”
His whole career has been centered around striving to protect middle and working-class people, he said, who are trying “to make ends meet, and just hanging on by their fingertips.
“I know of what I speak,” he went on. “I grew up in Queens, went to public school, went on to Catholic high school, and went to NYU, working nights. I went to work at 11 p.m. and came home at 7 a.m., slept for four hours, then went to class in the afternoon.”
His big break came while attending Georgetown Law School, when he got a job working in the Clinton White House. “I was not just living my dream. I was living the American dream,” Gioia went on. But, he said, he had “asked myself a simple question, do the kids going to P.S. 11 today have the same fair shot?”
During his years in the City Council, Gioia said, he had been an advocate for those in need in his community and around the city, bringing a bank to the area of the Queensbridge Houses, where, before, “The only financial institution within a mile was a check-cashing place.”
In addition, he said, he had taken on the warehouse store, Costco, when he learned that it did not accept food stamps, and, after a two-year fight, the company had recently agreed to accept food stamps. “That’s what good government is all about,” Gioia said.
“I am running for public advocate because I believe we need at least one person at the highest level of City Hall who sees the world with our eyes,” Gioia concluded, noting, “This is a very personal thing to me.”
